Pilgrim being a cutie pie offering a whole bunch of behaviors until he finally got the right one (touching the post-it note with his nose).

Pig is learning too!

Pilgrim learns a new trick!

Dogs’ training stuff `~~~```~~ I will tag this shit with “adventuresinoperantconditioning” so people can block it if they don’t want to read my ramblings. Whenever I am in the kitchen/living room with the dogs I want them to be chilling/lounging and not playing/whining at Picard (coughPilgrimcough), so I have them on a variable interval schedule. Basically how I have been setting that up is in Excel making like 10 cells and then typing random numbers until the average is what I want (I have been doing 5 because they are crazy beans and need as much reinforcement as they can get). Then the number is the number of minutes and after that number of minutes passes if they are chilling I give them a reinforcer. The only problem I foresee is that those numbers I input aren’t truly random, but the idea is good and it seems to be working (more chilling less being crazy beans). Thus far, Pig doesn’t really get that she doesn’t have to be staring at me the whole time but I am hoping that will go away because I try to reinforce her when she is looking away. Once I get them more chillaxed I will introduce Eunice in crate through open door with barrier at door, so they can see her and smell her but there are double barriers where they can’t get to her. For the moment Eunice comes out for ~3-4 hours when they go to the garage for lunch, and then ~3-4 hours when they go to the garage for dinner. They are used to being contained for periods throughout the day and I am trying to keep it that way, because when school starts they will be again. Pilgrim gets really excited by the smell of Eunice, and is of course still excited by the presence of Picard, so I want to do more work with that as well. Fun stufffff.

so I am feeling slightly bad because I bought this harness for Eunice and was really excited to see if it fit so I could take her outside. At first I introduced it to her really slowly, reinforcing her for touching it, etc. Then I tried to lure her head through the hole and she was like naw. Then I just grabbed her and put it over her head and she was so pissed and biting it and just like it was not good and I feel bad and the thing was too big anyway and now it is going to be like doubly hard to convince her that harnesses are good, go me.

ahh so I am feeling super inspired and great and I just want to teach all the animals the things, I am planning out some rat training, it is going to be great.