Quick update

Just finished a quick training session with Marvin it has been a few weeks since our last. Things have been very busy lately with the holidays and all of the baby appointments. But I decided to try and move on from the clicker recognition to actual trick training. I decided to start with "the wave" because it’s fairly simple and he already steps up so well I thought that it might be easy for him to understand. I still used the plain baked chips as the reward which he does like but just doesn't quit go crazy for I may try some other rewards but for now I’m going to stick with the baked chips. I did not record this session because it was just kind of spur of the moment training and I wasn’t sure there would be much if anything that would be interesting to watch.

I started off having him step up off the perch and rewarding him with click and chip. Did this about 3 or 4 times and he seem to lose interest in the reward, even though he would continue to step up. Thinking that he may have been losing interest in stepping up I tried moving on to "the wave". To do this you act as though you are giving him a finger to step up on but move it away slightly so that he just lifts his foot and doesn’t actually step up on your finger. And so every time he lifted his leg I would click and reward. Now with this I am also giving him a verbal command of "wave" and using my left hand to wave at him, kind of in the way that a toddler would wave at someone; with my fingers together and just moving my fingers up and down at the knuckles. Now the idea is that eventually I can either just say "wave" or wave my hand at him and he will lift his foot on command. How ever there was some confusing from him on this whole having a finger to step up on and then having it move away business. a few times he somewhat lost his balance a bit and there was a few times where he was quicker than I was and actually got up on my finger (which I did not reward him for) but hopefully with some more sessions like this he will begin to recognize the cues and figure out that all he needs to do is lift his foot and he will get a reward.

Now the problems I am noticing with him not accepting the reward I think is due to the fact that he is not used to accepting food from a person’s hand. I believe that he may be either confused or intimidated by this gesture; hopefully overtime this will not be an issue.