Working on "The Nod"

Today I decided "the nod" with Marvin now this is something he somewhat already knows, which you may have seen him do in this posting showing his tricks that he already knows. now before I started his training today I made sure that he was hungry; meaning that I did not yet fill his food bowl for the day. Doing this more likely ensures that he is more willing to accept the food reward that I have to offer him, once the training session is complete he goes back to his cage and a full food bowl awaits him.

So since Marvin already kind of knows how to do the nod this should be fairly easy to convert with the clicker and reward. Currently he will do the nod if I nod my head he will copy me. But I want him to do it on a different command; me moving my hand in an up and down (head nodding) motion. So to make the transformation from one cue to another I first start off by giving the cue with my hand; which obviously he doesn’t know what to do when he sees that. After a few seconds of moving my hand I begin to nod my head in conjunction with my hand; once he starts to bob his head I stop moving my head and just continue to move my hand, if he continues to bob his head without me nodding mine, then I click and give him the reward. The idea here is that it can slowly ease my head nodding out and just have him nod his head with the cue from my hand instead (this make me look less silly).

We did this about 3 or 4 times successfully today. although his head nod we not very dramatic; just some slight up and down movements from him, they were 'nods' and that is exactly what I’m looking for, so I took it as a successful training session. Hopefully with some more sessions like this we cut out my head cue and only need the hand cue. Once Marvin is done with his training I will usually let him have some free time out of his cage as another reward. We have a wall hanging play area that he enjoys quite a bit. Which if we wanted to, it also folds up and disguises itself as a picture frame.