Train a Chicken!

People ask me all the time why you train a chicken.  Well... the idea is that training a chicken with a clicker and rewards, you learn a lot about the training and learning process.  It teaches you the power of a reward, even on a stupid animal like a chicken.  More importantly, it teaches you timing!  TIMING IS HUGE!  If you don't have good timing you're messing up your training and you don't even know it.  With dogs, it is harder to see because they are smart and often times are trying to figure you out so you may not see the mistake you've made until it is ingrained and a trained behavior. Then you have to do a lot of back tracking.  With a chicken, you can see the mistake you've made immediately because they're stupid enough that it happens right away.  So if your timing is off you see it and can fix it before it becomes a problem.

This chicken camp wasn't that long, only half a day, so we didn't get as much time with the chicken as I would have liked but man it was fun and very informative.  Meet my partner in crime!

This is Cindy, my chicken.  She was an older chicken and very smart.  We made great progress.  Since she was older she was probably anticipating me more than the others and was able to catch on to me better.  It is pretty humbling when a chicken is waiting on you and you're the one bumbling about.

First, we started with the chicken dance with Terry Ryan.  You think I didn't get up and dance?  Guess again!  Of course I did the chicken dance.  I jumped at the chance to dance a chicken dance with a major name in the dog training industry.  Duh, do you not know me at all?

Then we did some studying on the clicker.  I have to say that Angie teaches the clicker really well because I knew exactly what to do where a lot of people in the class had never done a clicker before.  So that made me pretty proud that I already had a great understanding of this training process.

Then we got to train the chickens.  First we were training them to peck a red disk.  In order to get them to peck you have to click and reward any behavior that could lead to a peck.  That's the hardest bit.  So the chicken leans down toward the dot, you click it and feed so that the chicken repeats that behavior.  That's where you see your mistakes.  If you clicked and rewarded the wrong thing you will see your chicken repeating a behavior that you didn't want.  The goal is: peck, click, reward.  I had my chicken pecking the red dot in no time.

Then we were going to train them to do something they've never done before.  We put a yellow disk down and only rewarded the chicken pecking the red one.  The chicken is normally rewarded for pecking a disk presented to them so they have to learn that the reward is only coming on the red one so they start targeting that.  Cindy was a star so we were able to move on quickly to pieces of paper in different shapes, teaching the chicken to click a specific shape.  That was something the chickens had NEVER done before so that was pretty cool to see that it didn't take long to teach an animal like a chicken to do something like that.  The power of a clicker and reward is very cool.

Terry Ryan!

Cindy and I, the chicken team!

This was an AWESOME experience and I am so sad that it was the last day of the conference.  Waiting to fly home now.

I am so lucky to have been able to do this.  I am so full of promise and excitement for what possibilities there are.  Please please please keep a hold of this.