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Lessons from Exotics

Lara Joseph explains how ring-tailed lemur pair Dill and Pickles landed at her training center and how working with exotics such as these helps her finesse her training skills

Ialways enjoy training and applying behavior analysis to the exotic and undomesticated animals I work with. Both these groups present me with plenty of variety as well as various levels of complexity I have to draw on and apply in order to put my skills to work. To explain exactly what I mean, I am going to talk about Dill and Pickles, two ringtailed lemurs I am currently working with.

When I first met Dill and Pickles, I was walking by their exhibit during a professional zoo visit. At that moment, they were in the area of their enclosure that was closest to where I was walking. They followed me as I walked by, hanging onto the edge of the enclosure, so I made and kept eye contact. This could either have been reinforcing or aversive, I didn’t know at that point. As they kept following me, I identified that something was reinforcing their behavior, whether I desired it or not. As I didn’t yet know what it was, I continued the interaction to try to identify it. If I stopped walking, they would stay in the position closest to me. If I backed up along the edge of the enclosure, they would move in that direction too, again staying closest to me.

Before I went any further in potentially reinforcing an undesired behavior, I chose to offer them food reinforcers to see if they would accept them. Indeed they did, but cautiously. I identified this through their behavior, which included them not turning their backs on me, keeping eye contact, maintaining a leg and body posture ready for retreat, and holding their tails over their backs like squirrels. These were all observable and measurable behaviors that I could work on decreasing.

In order to identify motivation, I began tossing food reinforcers into their enclosure and simply waiting to see what they did next. This turned out to be returning to the edge of the enclosure after they had jumped down to the ground to take the food. This provided me with more observable and measurable behavior. I had no previous history with these two lemurs and a keeper wasn’t around for me to ask about their typical behavior, so I decided to approach, with care, and hand them food through the cage bars while making them reach for it during protective contact. They straight away began taking food from my hands and while they were doing so, I was able to observe the position of their ears, what they were looking at, the position of their bodies, and their vocalizations. The whole time I was identifying what these behaviors looked and sounded like while they were eating, between eating, and during my moving around the outside of the enclosure. What I saw and heard was motivation. Target Training Via this protective contact, i.e. with the cage bars between us but Dill and Pickles being able to touch my hands with their mouths, I noticed ...training the multiple varieties of species the exotic world encompasses helps us fine-tune our application and understanding of the Laws of Behavior: What does that behavior mean? When does the behavior happen? When doesn’t it happen? Is this a positive reinforcer or an aversive and how do I find out? Am I actually using a negative reinforcer and, if so, how can I change my approach?

Author Lara Joseph started her training plan with ringtailed lemurs Dill and Pickles by identifying positive reinforcers while observing behavior contingent on the immediate environment © Lara Joseph

they were taking food from my fingers gently, so I began moving my fingers in closer proximity and, eventually, right through the cage bars. They continued to take the food gently from me, so I made the next move, which was to introduce a target stick. By having them focus on the target stick and eventually touching it with their noses, I began teaching them contingency, i.e. the cause and effect between the behavior and the consequence (DogNostics, 2018). I conducted several training sessions like this as I needed us all to understand the behaviors being requested before I moved on to my next step.

I would remove the target stick from the environment after each nose target by placing the end of it under my arm because I needed them to understand exactly what was earning them the food reinforcer. We practiced this in several different areas outside the enclosure until I felt very comfortable with our interactions and understanding of antecedents, behaviors, and consequences. It was time to implement the next step in my training approach and so I went to find the keeper responsible for cleaning Dill and Pickles’ enclosure. He told me he did go in but did not interact much with them. He also said they kept their distance but would come closer when their food was delivered. My next step, then, was to enter the enclosure. As I walked in, I immediately began tossing treats to the ground in the same area as where I had begun the training outside the enclosure. Again, I was watching and listening to their behavior and noting the similarities to what I had seen and heard outside. My next step was to start walking around, but not behind them or when their backs were turned. When they had to take

Joseph learns to understand individual behavior while targeting via protective contact © Lara Joseph

their eyes off of me to eat the food reinforcer, I made sure to not move as I did not want to scare them or make them any more cautious. They quickly returned to me after the delivery of every treat. It did not take long to see that I had quickly earned their trust through pairing every possible action of mine with the positive reinforcer.

After several sessions over a period of different visits to the zoo, I could tell that my approach had become the cue that training was about to begin. Lemurs can jump far and fast, a behavior that is often paired with fear or excitement. Along with their vocalizations and continuing to go to the side of the exhibit closest to me, I was very confident that what I was seeing in Dill and Pickles was excitement. Empowering animals like this by making the training itself a highly valued form of enrichment is the primary reason that I train, and why it is so effective to enrich animals through training. Training in Tandem From experience, I know that if I train one animal at a time, I can get the targeted behaviors faster. I could have separated Dill and Pickles but via

Through her understanding of behavior through training, Joseph was confident and comfortable moving inside the enclosure © Lara Joseph

our early interactions, I quickly identified that Dill found comfort in having Pickles with him. It was at that point I chose to never separate them as far as was possible. In fact, to date, I have not found the need to do that. To accommodate the situation, I would often focus my immediate attention and shaping of behaviors on Pickles while tossing reinforcers to Dill. When I took this approach, it didn’t take long for me to be able to shape the same behaviors to Dill and even begin having Dill offer the behaviors first.

As we progressed, I began training Dill and Pickles to station by pointing to an area and requesting them to go there. Via small approximations, rates of reinforcement, and care in not pushing them past their comfort levels, they were soon both bouncing to different areas around the enclosure. Next, I started to increase the complexity by asking vertical stations vs. horizontal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, cueing Pickles from the ground to a swing that was 6 feet high seemed to draw a lot of attention from spectators. This provided me with the perfect opportunity to educate the zoo’s visitors on the power of positive reinforcement. Meanwhile, I was having a lot of fun watching Dill and Pickles blossom through our training sessions. But the fall season was quickly approaching and I knew they would soon be taken off exhibit, meaning my training opportunities with them would be limited. I decided to ask the zoo if they could come to my training center for the winter so we could keep working. Dill and Pickles thus duly made the transport to The Animal Behavior Center in Sylvania, Ohio, where I am based.

Unfortunately, they found being transported stressful because I had not been able to crate train them and shape the behavior of moving calmly from one location to the next. Sadly, the weather left us out of time for that. Now, however, they are here with me and I am happy to say we are at the stage where they are both going into a crate together and I can shut the door (see video, Crate Training). Settling In When Dill and Pickles first came to my training center, I started by giving them a few days to settle in. There were new sounds and unfamiliar animals for them to get used to, and it was the first time in their two years of life that they had been moved. I experimented with them to see if training would provide the only familiar thing I could offer them and they instantly responded as I worked at generalizing familiar behaviors and cues to their new environment. Since they had originally been quickly receptive to my training at the zoo, I assumed they would be receptive to anyone that was taking the same approach. This was not the

case, however. When I asked different volunteers to go into their enclosure and point to different perches, I would see Dill and Pickles huddle in the corner and not even take their favored food reinforcers offered by the volunteers. And so it was back to the drawing board to shape calm in the presence of unfamiliar people.

I began this process by asking our volunteers to introduce themselves through the enclosure bars, just as I had when I first began working with the lemur pair. Next, they began training the same things I had trained when I first entered their enclosure at the zoo. As a result, just one week after they arrived here at my training center, numerous people were able to get most of the behaviors I had already trained, in addition to my teaching them to enter and exit their crates.

Laws of Behavior As my experience working with this lemur pair shows, training the multiple varieties of species the exotic world encompasses helps us finetune our application and understanding of the Laws of Behavior: What does that behavior mean? When does the behavior happen? When doesn’t it happen? Is this a positive reinforcer or an aversive and how do I find out? Am I actually using a negative reinforcer and, if so, how can I change my approach?

I have been working with exotics and undomesticated animals for many years. I entered this field of work to help empower these animals by providing enrichment, choice, control, and increasing complexities. The inordinate number of different species I work with present me with a vast array of neverending complexities as I work to determine my training approach in each and every situation. The field I have chosen encompasses prey, predator, matriarchal communities, variety in locomotion, unique reinforcers, intricate behavior modification situations, and, in fact, more than I can list. The infinite uniqueness it offers has finetuned my fluency in applied animal behavior and training beyond measure. n

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References Animal Behavior Center. (2019, October 21). Crate Training [Video File]. Samantha Sarin M.S. BCBA training ring-tailed lemurs, Dill and Pickles, to enter and exit the crate at The Animal Behavior Center's All Species Animal Training & Behavior Workshop. Available at: youtu.be/R2jjkTDaO8s DogNostics Career Center. (2018). A Practical Lexicon for Pet Trainers & Behavior Consultants! The Language You Need to Know. (n.p.): Authors Resources Joseph, L. (2019, July). Learning from Mother Nature. BARKS from the Guild (37) 48-50. Available at: bit.ly/2TFEWCp

Lara Joseph is the owner of The Animal Behavior Center (theanimalbehaviorcenter.com), an international, educational center in Sylvania, Ohio focusing on teaching people how to live, love, and work with animals using positive reinforcement and approaches in Applied Behavior Analysis. She is a professional animal behavior consultant and trainer with a focus on exotics, travels internationally giving workshops and lectures, and provides online, live-streaming learning programs on behavior, training, and enrichment. Her focus is on behavior and training with all species of animals whether in the home, shelter, zoo, or as educational ambassadors. She sits on the advisory board for All Species Consulting, The Indonesian Parrot Project, Collaboration for Avian Welfare, and is the director of animal training for Nature's Nursery, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Whitehouse, Ohio. She is also the founder of several animal organizations for animal welfare and has much experience working with special needs animals. She is a published author and writes regularly for several periodicals and also blogs for Deaf Dogs Rock. She has also been asked to co-author and is currently working on an international manual of animal behavior and training. She is a guest lecturer in Zoo Biology: Animal Nutrition, Behavior and Diagnostics taught by Dr. Jason Crean at St. Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois.

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