Dogs . Basic
obedience training tasks for dogs, include walking on a leash, attention,
housebreaking, nonaggression, and
socialization with humans or other pets. Dogs are also trained for many other activities, such as
dog sports,
service dogs, and
working dog tasks. Positive reinforcement for dogs can include primary reinforcers like food or social reinforcers, such as vocal ("good boy") or tactile (stroking) ones. Positive punishment, if used at all, can be physical, such as pulling on a leash or spanking. It may also be vocal, such as saying "bad dog". Bridges to positive reinforcement, include vocal cues, whistling, and
dog whistles, as well as
clickers used in
clicker training, a method popularized by
Karen Pryor. Negative reinforcement may also be used. Punishment is also a tool, including withholding of food or physical discipline.
Horses The primary purpose of training
horses is to socialize them around humans, teach them to behave in a manner that makes them safe for humans to handle, and, as adults to carry a
rider under
saddle or to be
driven in order to pull a
vehicle. As prey animals, much effort must be put into training horses to overcome its natural
flight or fight instinct and accept handling that would not be natural for a wild animal, such as willingly going into a confined space, or having a predator (a human being) sit on its back. As training advances, some horses are prepared for competitive sports, up to the
Olympic games, where horses are the only non-human animal athlete that is used at the Olympics. All
equestrian disciplines from
horse racing to
draft horse showing require the horse to have specialized training. Unlike dogs, horses are not motivated as strongly by positive reinforcement rewards as they are motivated by other
operant conditioning methods such as the release of pressure as a reward for the correct behavior, called
negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement techniques such as petting, kind words, rewarding of treats, and clicker training have some benefit, but not to the degree seen in dogs and other predator species. Punishment of horses is effective only to a very limited degree, usually a sharp command or brief physical punishment given within a few seconds of a disobedient act. Horses do not correlate punishment to a specific behavior unless it occurs immediately. They do, however, have a remarkably long memory, and once a task is learned, it will be retained for a very long time. For this reason, poor training or allowing bad habits to be learned can be very difficult to remedy at a later date.
Birds Typical training tasks for companion birds include perching, non-aggression, halting feather-picking, controlling excessive vocalizations, socialization with household members and other pets, and socialization with strangers. The large parrot species frequently have lifespans that exceed that of their human owners, and they are closely bonded to their owners. Some
birds of prey are trained to hunt, an ancient art known as
falconry or
hawking. In
China the practice of training
cormorants to catch fish has gone on for over 1,200 years.
Chickens Training chickens has become a way for trainers of other animals (primarily dogs) to perfect their training technique. Bob Bailey, formerly of Animal Behavior Enterprises and the
IQ Zoo, teaches chicken training seminars where trainers teach poultry to discriminate between shapes, to navigate an obstacle course and to chain behaviors together. Chicken training is done using
operant conditioning, using a clicker and chicken feed for reinforcement. The first chicken workshops were given by Keller and Marian Breland in 1947–1948 to a group of animal feed salesmen from General Mills, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Trained chickens may be confined to a display (Bird Brain) where they play
Tic-Tac-Toe against humans for a fee, invented by Bob Bailey and Grant Evans, of Animal Behavior Enterprises. The moves were chosen by computer and indicated to the chicken by a light invisible to the human player.
Fish and molluscs Fish can also be trained. For example,
goldfish may swim toward their owners and follow them as they walk through the room, but will not follow anyone else. The fish may swim up and down, signalling the owner to turn on its
aquarium light when it is off, and it will skim the surface until its owner feeds it. Fish have also been taught to perform more complicated tasks, such as fetching rings, swimming through hoops and tubes, doing the limbo and pushing a miniature soccer ball into a net. Fish have been taught to distinguish and respond differently to slight differences in human faces displayed on a screen (archerfish) or styles of music (goldfish and koi). Molluscs, with totally different brain designs, have been taught to distinguish and respond to geometric symbols (cuttlefish and octopus), and have been taught that food behind a clear barrier cannot be eaten (squid). == Wild animals ==