COALHURST, Alta. — The chicken opened its piano concert with the first few bars of Richard Wagner’s Bridal Chorus,from the opera, Lohengrin.
All Fs.
After that, the melody was lost, but a chicken playing piano badly is secondary to the fact that a chicken plays piano at all.
Donna McLaughlin, an animal trainer who lives near Coalhurst, Alta., used clicker techniques to get the desired piano playing response from the chicken. And whatever a chicken lacks in keyboard skills, it makes up for in its ability to train better trainers.
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McLaughlin usually trains dogs, and has been training various animals for about 25 years.
But a workshop with renowned animal trainer Bob Bailey several years ago employed chickens in student training. Besides being cheap and plentiful, chickens present unique challenges to animal trainers.
“Dogs read us very well. They’ve done studies and they read us better than other primates do. So they can read if we’re happy or sad. They can be easier to train because they take those cues and we can be sloppy trainers with dogs and still accomplish things.
“Whereas a chicken, they don’t read us at all. So you either use the theory correctly or you’re not going to get the behaviours. The whole point of the chicken is to train the trainer.”
Using a clicker device, McLaughlin makes a noise whenever the chicken behaves in the desired way. That is followed as soon as possible by a reward of food.
Chickens move quickly, so the clicker acts as a bridge between the behaviour and reward.
That way, the chicken makes the connection between the action and prize.
“It says to the animal, ‘you’ve done it right, your food is coming.’”
Whales and dolphins are similarly trained at aquariums, using a whistle instead of a clicker. And the technique works well on other animals, including dogs, cats, horses and donkeys.
Piano pecking is a simple behaviour for a chicken, said McLaughlin. At the workshop, the real challenge was encouraging a chicken to walk in a figure eight pattern around two cones, a more complex response.
She and the other students succeeded.
“You can train animals without force or punishment,” said McLaughlin. “I look for behaviours I want instead of focusing on the behaviours I don’t want.”
She has also successfully used clicker training with her donkey, Calvin, so he will allow his feet to be trimmed. The animals are notorious for objecting to hoof work.
“It’s hard to even get a farrier to come. You leave a message on their answering machine and you say donkey and you won’t hear back from them at all.”
By using the click followed by food reward technique, she has trained the donkey so she no longer needs a halter or tie to work on its hoofs.
“I’m so pleased with how good he is now with his feet, because he just stands beautifully.”
Clicker training teaches new behaviours fairly rapidly and McLaughlin said that’s how many dogs in televi- sion shows are trained.
In fact, two weeks ago, she and one of her poodles were asked to participate in an episode ofPet Heroes,a television show about animals produced by Alberta Film Animals.
McLaughlin clicker trained the dog to retrieve a cellphone and dig into someone’s pocket as the show recreated assistance rendered by a pet.
“(Clicker training) has many, many applications,” she said. “For service animals that assist people, dogs can be taught to retrieve items as small as a coin. They could pick up a DVD and put it in the machine, those kinds of things.”
It takes patience to be an animal trainer, McLaughlin said. The key is to take guidance from the animal.
“If something’s not working, you really have to stop and go OK, let’s take a break here. Nine times out of 10, it’s something I’m doing wrong. I need to change my behaviour, I need to change something, because I find when you get it right, when you communicate right, it just comes.”
