Course III - Chaining - Day 2

On Thursday we had to turn in our plans of how our chickens are going to perform the apparatus and the selected tasks on it. Planing was kind of hard and I had to think a lot, but I managed to come up with a plan.

Here is my top chicken's end behavior:

1. Chicken walks up the ladder
2. Gets around the platform pole.
3. Walks on the bar to another platform pole.
4. On the platform chicken pick up a furry stuffed animal - a small koala bear -> drops down form the platform edge the koala bear



6. Walks down the ladder.
7. Pecks one key of mini-piano



7. Piano sound will star the laser light on the discrimination wall -> laser light discrimination

Here is Mr. Bailey explaining something in the apparatus. In the picture you can see the whole apparatus and picture my top chicken doing these behaviors on it.



My bottom chicken is going to perform the following sequence

1. Walks up the ladder.
2. Goes around the platform pole.
3. Walks o the bar to another platform.
4. On the platform picks up a rubber frog and drops it down from the platform edge.



5. Walks down the ladder.
6. Has the laser light discrimination.

We had time until noon to evaluate our plans and see how they worked. I felt good about my plan, but I did do one change. For my top chicken I had planed at home to have her pull rubber band when she comes down the ladder, but instead I planed her to do the piano playing. I found the piano from one of the toy boxes this morning and immediately thought that this could be good for my top chicken since she is so keen to peck. I evaluated her pecking to the piano and thought that I could get eventually hard enough peck that she could get one of the keys sound. And she was not even scared of the piano sound.

I spoke Jari about getting a harder peck and he proposed that I move the red target right to the edging of the piano key that I wanted her to peck. It would be the most light for her to peck in there.



I decided to practice the apparatus and dot pecking/red light behaviors today and leave the other behaviors to following days. As I had already noticed yesterday, I really did not have to practice with the chicken the apparatus. They both knew how to do it. I only reinforced them walking it to keep the behavior on.

Pecking and red laser light went OK. In the end of the day I had the bottom chicken waiting 8 seconds and bottom chicken 4 seconds the red light to be turned on. I had real problems with the bottom chicken since she stopped pecking the black dot when the red light was turned on. The reason probably was that some previous trainer had trained her sweeping the dot and hurrying to the cup when the red light was on. I only captured that behavior twice with my clicker accidentally, but then she started to offer it more and I had to be really careful that I did not click those pecks that were only sweeps to the dot.

I moved the apparatus platforms to upper position and placed the black dot/red laser light discrimination underneath the pole. My chicken went the apparatus as easily as they did before in this upper position and they perform the discrimination under the platform as good as in the board that I was rehearsing them. The only thing was that the discrimination underneath the platform was kind of hard for me and also it was really time consuming move up and down the platforms. It took me and my partner Karen 5 minutes each time to set the platform higher or lower position. Karen's chicken needed the platform in lower position. So I might have to reconsider for tomorrow that I don't have the light discrimination underneath the platform at all, but have the board next to the apparatus on the final behavior. I have to think that overnight.



Karen's chicken were really slowing down, because they were getting full . Her chicken is the chicken 47 that I had in the first course, the one that had kind of a small crop and would get full quite soon. The same chicken was having little bit issues to walk on the ladder and Mr. Bailey came for help. He advised Karen to firs just lure the bird up and down the ladder to have her move around. That did the trick and Karen started to get more foot movement.



Here is Karen's chicken already going much more quickly.



The timer was set to 44 minutes today. That meant that every trainer had 20 minutes training time. That was divided to 10 minutes training periods - so we got two 10 min training periods in one training session. The ten minutes we could use as we liked. That meant for me dividing the time between red light discrimination practice and apparatus training. Even though I did not practice the third behavior - picking up frog and koala bear - I had hard time dividing the time equally between my two chickens. I tended to practice too long with red light discrimination task.