Remy's Training-Day 3

February 24, 2016

Today, I continued my attempts to shape Remy. It is my second day of only attempting to shape, as magazine training has been completed but she still isn't pressing the bar reliably. So, my goal was to get her to figure out that pressing the bar elicits a food reinforcement.

Remy at the food magazine

Remy figuring out the bar

Remy was food deprived to approximately 90% of her starting weight and weighed in at 199.8. This figure rounds up to her target weight, which was 200 grams. My procedure for today was similar to what it was on the second day; I planned to reinforce Remy when she sniffed or touched the bar and hoped that she would press it with intention once she realized that I was trying to reinforce that behavior.

The results for today were not very encouraging--Remy only pressed the bar 3 times and it seemed like each of those times was an accident. She also spent a great deal of her time grooming which took away from time that we could have been actively training. Although she still seems to be magazine trained, she just isn't understanding that pressing the bar elicits a food reinforcement, so I am not satisfied with her shaping progress and will continue shaping tomorrow. Today's session went for 30 minutes and I issued 29 reinforcements.

Cumulative record 2/24/2016

Discussion:
In the beginning of our training session, Remy appeared to be ready to work hard. Within the first three minutes, she went to the bar six times. She was, however, very nervous and jumpy today, so after first exploring the box and the bar was too distracted for reinforcement. Remy is also still very interested in the light above the bar, and the times that she pressed the bar were times that she sort of fell on it after rearing up to sniff the light. She does seem to understand the concept that being near the bar is a good thing, but every time I would try to not reinforce her for something (sniffing the bar for example) so that she would exert more effort and touch the bar instead just seemed to make her do the same thing again and check the magazine for reinforcements anyway.


I have been informed that shaping taking this amount of time is pretty normal, so I will try again tomorrow--maybe with some new, more effective tactics.

-Jessica