Ken Ramirez Seminar

On Valentine's Weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a seminar with Ken Ramirez, the VP of Animal Collections and Animal Training at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. He was in Arroyo Grande at Gentle Pets Training. Teah always manages to get some amazing trainers in for her workshops, and I was lucky to get to attend. Sixteen hours was simply not enough time. We learned all kinds of advanced training skills.

I was fascinated by concept training, which is teaching the animal concepts like "right and left" or "up and down" or "big and small," so that you could attach this concept cue to any behavior. For example, Roscoe spins left and right, but he has two cues for the two behaviors. If I had taught him the concept of left or right, I could have just taught him "spin" and then added "left" or "right" to the spin cue without having to teach two separate behaviors. We also learned about mimicry -- teach the animal the concept of mimicking and then you can have him copy any behavior without going through the steps of shaping the behavior over time -- and about secondary reinforcers -- training the animal to like something besides food as a reward - clapping, saying "yay!," a butt skritch, etc.

This video shows some of Ken's ideas at work: Shark Training