| REFERENCE | Learnings from Animals and Zoo Keepers - bdemirjian/apbr2 GitHub Wiki
Learnings from Zoo Keepers
The idea presented here is how to work with very dangerous partners in a safe way.
Lessons from those who do not have a choice in picking their partners, we are describing those tasked with teaching multi-ton animals to partner with humans in a safe environment.
1 Least Reinforcing Scenario (LRS) – (Common use)
Following an incorrect response from the animal, the trainer pauses for a brief (~3 seconds) period during which no reinforcement is available. The trainer then delivers a cue, thereby providing the next opportunity for the animal to earn reinforcement.
2 Negative Punishment – (Technical definition)
A behavior is followed immediately by the removal of a stimulus (or a decrease in the intensity of the stimulus), that decreases the future frequency of similar behaviors under similar conditions (Cooper, Heron, and Heward, 2007).
(Example) When a child “talks back” to his/her mother, the child may lose the privilege of watching his/her favorite television program. If the loss of viewing privileges decreases the likelihood of the child talking back in the future it acts as a negative punisher.
3 Negative Reinforcement – (Technical definition)
Occurs when a behavior is followed by the removal of, or a decrease in the intensity of, an aversive stimulus, resulting in a decrease in the future frequency of similar behaviors under similar conditions (Chance, 1999).
(Example) When an animal is restrained firmly for a medical exam, the keeper handling the animal may relax his firm hold if the animal quits struggling. The decrease in intensity of the firm hold (presumably aversive to the animal) negatively reinforces the desired behavior of relaxing and ceasing to struggle.
4 Positive Punishment – (Technical definition)
A behavior is followed immediately by the presentation of a stimulus that decreases the future frequency of similar behaviors under similar conditions (Cooper, Heron, and Heward, 2007).
(Example) If a trainer is petting a cat’s fur in a way that the cat finds unpleasant, the cat may attempt to bite the trainer. If the cat’s bite decreases the likelihood that the trainer will pet the cat in that same way in the future, it acts as a positive punisher.
5 Positive Reinforcement – (Technical definition)
Occurs when a behavior is followed immediately by the presentation of a stimulus that increases the future frequency of similar behaviors under similar conditions (Cooper, Heron, and Heward, 2007).
(Example) A trainer presents a target a few inches in front of a komodo dragon. When the dragon touches the target, the trainer delivers a preferred edible item. If the delivery of the edible item increases the likelihood that the dragon will touch the target when it is presented in the future, the edible item acts as a positive reinforcer.
American Association of Zookeepers
Learn How to Persuade from your House Cat
Cats having chosen to be domesticated versus Dogs who were driven by food pressure to domestication have a reputation of revisiting that choice frequently and reminding us of that fact. :P Cat owners can I get a thumbs-up?
TLDR
- What is your goal? Be clear in your head about it first and never lose track of it.
- Is the timing right?
- Is the mood of your audience or opponent favorable?
- Is she or he paying attention?
- Mind your tense. Talking in past tense is usually about blaming. So talk in future tense and give choices.
- Make sure your opponent or audience like you and trust you.
- Remember that you have meet your ends walking through your audience’s beliefs. Emotions are more powerful than intellect (for most people) and beliefs are more powerful than rationality, facts and statistics (for most people). Hard fact, but true.
- Be mindful of your body language, posture and facial expressions. Look confident.
- Break your end goal in to bite sized chunks. LURE your audience to do these bite sized easy tasks and slowly RAMP it up to your final goal.
1 Practice Agreeability
The wisdom of CATS, stating that, when two humans disagree with each other their goal is to make their opponent admit that she is wrong, whereas when a CAT disagrees with anyone, his primary goal is to get what he wants. CATS also understand the importance of an Agreeable Personality. Such a personality leads to happier relationships, more successful career and a more persuasive life.
Hard Stuff
- Even if your opponent attacks you personally, do not get angry. Just nod your head and stay as calm as possible or at least show that you are calm.
2 Perfect your timing | learn the art of the pounce
Pounce like a Predator
Early CATS only manage to get a worm, while a patient and quiet CAT eats better. Jay, advises that to argue like a predator, you need to settle down first. Watch and Listen. Pay attention to your prey ( your opponent). Then gather your thoughts, gain a good perspective of the whole issue and finally pounce when the moment is ripe. Contrary to this, we humans, usually tend to argue like silly dogs. We bark at each other, get angry and attack each other, lose our way and make ourselves look like idiots. Jay, urges you to be a WISE CAT … Not a SILLY DOG.
3 ANGER BREEDS ANGER | Defuse Anger
Cooling things down with a thing called the future! Anger breeds more anger. Blaming your opponent or snubbing then down can only worsen the situation. The most useful tool to take anger out of the equation is to: switch to the future. Even if you are the victim, rather than blaming the perpetrator, try to talk about a possible choices and course of action so the same thing is not repeated in future.
4 Fit in with the clan by practicing perfect decorum
This commandment is a further extension of the first one. The first one urges you to have an agreeable personality. This one suggests you one of the ways, how. An agreeable personality in one social group can be a disagreeable in another one. Try to FIT-IN the CLAN Learn the rules, the likes and dislikes, the dos and donts, unstiffen your neck. Learn the art of retaining your individuality but at the same time adapting to the social group to which your opponent belongs to. Be a bit flexible.
5 Earn Loyalty | by wielding the tools of character 3Cs
If you have earned the trust of people, you are bound to be successful at persuading them as you wish. And you do this by mastering the 3Cs:-
Caring
Which means making people believe that you put their interests before your own.
Craft
Which means making your target audience believe that you are really good at your craft.
Cause
Which means making your target audience believe that you represent a good cause ( remember that the definition of good changes from person to person and from one group to another).
6 Argue Logically | and persuade a CAT to come to you
When you argue with someone, you can not just say — “I want to do this - because I like doing this”. That is like a dog chasing its own tail. Don’t be a silly dog. Always argue with REASON. A good reason is what your audience or opponent believes to be true ( not what you believe to be true, or what facts and statistics indicate). So, know your opponent, know your audience first. Then tailor your personality and tune in your logic according to them.
7 Avoid Manipulation | logical fallacies and why they fool us
Persuasion is a dark art. More often than not, one is always at the risk of getting persuaded from salespeople to politicians. Here, Jay, cautions you that it is not just about you trying to manipulate others, it is also about not getting manipulated yourself. This can be done by being wary of façade words and logical fallacies. He urges you to keep and active and alert mind and use critical thinking to see through these two devils. Strike a balance between trusting someone vs being cynical or simply curious about them.
Seek clarification
For example, if someone says something like — “Something is going on” …. you should immediately put your critical thinking hat and ask back — “ What exactly do you mean by Something? and What do you mean by going on?”
8 Talk with Your Body and convince with tone and gesture
Details stresses the fact that communication is more than just talking. Never underestimate the importance of body language — he says. Here are few tips he shares with us
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Sitting Posture: While sitting, imagine your head to be a balloon that is floating straight up to the ceiling and is pulling your spine along with it. Keep your spine away from the back rest of the chair, and to avoid yourself looking stiff, relax your shoulders straight down.
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Standing Posture: While standing, you must tuck in your hips, pull your shoulders back and then relax them straight down and balance your head between your shoulders.
Avoid crossing arms unless someone is trying to talk you into something which you are not liking. While crossing arms make sure you grip around the outside of your arms rather than tucking in to the armpits. This shows confidence and self-respect.
- CATS know the most persuasive facial expressions start with the eyes. Eyes can listen and eyes can speak. For a listening eye, move your gaze from one eyeball of the speaker to the other. For a speaking eye, draw in all your energy in to your eyes and let them sparkle and twinkle.
9 Make Them Heed | one of the greatest tools of persuasion
Borrowing from the wisdom of Aristotle, the best way to make people heed, is the classic two pronged — LURE and RAMP model. According to Aristotle, not only do you need to build a desire for a goal, but also make the action seem easy or a lot of fun.
Break the final goal in to bite sized chunks and ramp up to your final goal. Not only does it give a sense of achievement to the person performing the task but it also makes it a lot more easy and fun to do. So if you want to get a CAT into a BOX, then place the box at a high position in the room, and build a ramp to enter the box and place small piece of chicken at regular intervals on the ramp and the final one inside the box.
10 Follow the Steps | learn the importance of Checklists
domestication source | Smithsonian Magazine
How to Argue with a Cat Summary
Lessons in Presence from your Dog
To see if we can learn lessons about our impact on a situation from observing how our dog responds to us.
1 Personal responsibility is real. Or: Everything is your fault
When teaching something new to an animal, clarity is everything. They have to know exactly what gives them access to the treat, or freedom, or whatever you’re using that is reinforcing. And if you’re trying to train more complicated behaviors, you have to break it down into easily understood steps that eventually layer on top of each other to get the desired behavior.
Border Collies Backflips
Have you ever seen those YouTube videos of the border collies doing backflips off their humans? (Get to Googling if you haven’t….) I can guarantee you that their humans did not just look at them one day, say “Backflip!” and waited until the dog happened to do a backflip.
If you try and get too complicated too quickly with your layering, dogs get confused and frustrated because they don’t know what you want and, much like people, they want to quit.
Spoiler: this is absolutely going to happen at some point with a young puppy. What surprised me is that when I asked Ala to do something I hadn’t laid the proper foundation for and she would get frustrated, I would get just as frustrated as her and start blaming everything under the sun.
My Fail Here
“She must be stubborn.” I’d say. Or, “These treats aren’t good enough.” Or, my favorite, “She just doesn’t like me enough to do this!”. These hurt to write down because they sound so stupid now.
There’s a concept in animal training that translates well to any sentient being you are trying to train, canine or person: The animal is never to blame. Animals aren’t just stubborn, stupid, or unmanageable.
2 Failure is just feedback
No matter what Ala did, good or bad, I would take it personally.
- Oh no, she’s jumping on someone! I’m a terrible dog owner with an uncontrollable beast of a dog.
- She came when called! I’m an amazing trainer with a perfect dog.
- Oh no, she’s chasing after an errant chicken instead of coming when called! Our relationship is a sham and she’ll never listen to me ever again because I’ll never be as fun as a chicken.
Whenever Ala behaved anything less than “perfect”, I would suddenly feel all of this shame and judgement. Every little thing she did was a reflection on my character and self-worth.
Turns out, my dog does not harbor secret plots to embarrass me, people don’t think twice about all the little behaviors I deem as less than desirable and, here comes the major shocker, THE WORLD DOES NOT REVOLVE AROUND ME!
Animals don’t factor in judgements about your self-worth or feelings when they make decisions. You’re not failing if you aren’t getting the results you want. But you are getting some spectacular feedback that your current plan isn’t working and you need to do something differently. That’s it. So quit judging your self-worth based on the feedback you’re getting and use it to change you’re approach.
3 Life is supposed to be fun
Teaching and learning is serious business. If you want your dog to be controlled, you need to communicate to them how serious this training business is. We can have fun when we’re just goofing off in the living room.
But I learn things a lot quicker when I’m having fun doing it. So why wouldn’t my dog be any different? As soon as I erased that boundary in my mind between “training” and “fun”, everything became a game and Ala learned so much quicker.
It taught me to look for more ways to add fun to my own life too. Exercising became a way to have fun. Learning a new language became a way to have fun. Whenever I wanted to learn something or instill a new habit, I started to look for how to make it a game and add a little fun to my life.
What I love about dogs is that the idea of everything in life being a way to have fun comes so naturally to them. Why we do we humans turn everything into such a chore?
4 Positive Reinforcement ONLY vs Carrot & Stick
When to give Rewards
When your pet is learning a new behavior, reward them every time they demonstrate that behavior. This is called continuous reinforcement. Once your pet has reliably learned the behavior, you want to switch to intermittent reinforcement.
- At first, reward with a treat four out of every five times they do the behavior. Over time, reward three out of five times, and so on, until you’re only rewarding occasionally.
- Don’t decrease the rewards too quickly or your dog could become frustrated or confused.
- Continue to praise every time—although once your dog has learned the behavior, your praise can become less excited.
- Vary how often you provide the reward so that your dog doesn’t figure out that they only have to respond every other time, for example. Your pet will soon learn that if they keep responding, eventually they’ll get what they want—your praise and an occasional treat.
By understanding positive reinforcement, you'll see that you're not forever bound to carry a pocketful of goodies. Your dog will soon be working for your verbal praise, because they want to please you and know that, occasionally, they'll get a treat too.
The Stick Fails. Why?
Unfortunately, punishment based training works – there I said it! But, you are in danger of creating a fearful dog who complies not because he wants to, but to avoid the expected punishment. Dogs cant tell us in words that they are scared or confused. Their body language though speaks volumes. I would rather have a happy dog who is eager to learn and earn than one who complies out of fear. Its not just my view, the science backs me up!
A dog trained using positive methods will retain the learning better and learn new things more quickly. I often find myself having to bite my tongue, I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I hope that they only train with punishment and fear because they don’t know better.