Attached is a picture of "Spinner" my careful/methodical and exceptionally nice working chicken. She didn't initially offer up a lot of actions and didn't go for luring so she taught me patience and the art of precision.
In this picture she's waiting for me to take her out of her cage as she was eager to work once she started learning and had a job to do.
In the end, I trained this chicken to peck on a the middle of a target and to spin 360 degrees. It was a great experience for both of us.
My next chicken was Discriminator (the white chicken pictured).
Discriminator was my discriminating chicken. We used shapes and the hexagon was the 'hot target' or the one we clicked/rewarded for when she pecked on it. Using reward and extinction methods, we were able to get Discriminator discriminating up to 4 different shapes (a hexagon, a triangle, a cross and a square) with over an 80% accuracy rate. It was very, very cool.
Once Discriminator was at the 80% marker, we started playing all kinds of fun games like pointing at different shapes (hot or cold targets), removing the hexagon completely, and of course randomly moving the shapes all of the table, including between the chicken's legs. Yeap, we were having a BLAST!
It's good to be home and I'm lucky enough to be able to attend the first two days of the Cueing Chicken Camp II on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week before I fly out to South Carolina where I'll be stepping in for another judging who isn't able to make it.
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