Learning Opportunity
Many years ago, when I was but a wee Godlet, my brother and I asked our Dad how they got animals to do tricks in the zoo. Now, this is my Dad's specialist subject, sort of, being a psychologist who'd done research on animals (not the nasty horrible chopping them up kind, more the 'are goldfish colour blind?' kind).

So he decided to show us. He made a machine that goes 'beep', without which it's not research, just arsing around, and some bacon. A whole packet of bacon, which he cut into small pieces. He then called the cat in.

He fed the cat a small piece of bacon. This got its attention, so she sat down to wait for more. Dad explained that he was going to train the cat to sit in the middle of the floor and raise a paw, whenever he made the machine go beep. This is apparently the standard technique (see this, and don't let anyone tell you b3ta isn't educational).

So we went for it. You start by waiting until the animal does something vaguely right, and reward that. Then you only reward behaviours that are nearer to what you want. And so on.

That's the theory. As far as I can work out, the cat decided that all it had to do was stay in the room, and it would be fed bacon.

A while later, we had a very annoyed Dad, whose experiment had failed; a very fat cat, which it took both of us to lift and carry to a quiet corner for a snooze; and a case of the giggles each.

Who'd have thought it. You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it seems that you can't teach a cat anything!
(purplegod counting down for Christmas!, Sat 9 Jun 2007, 20:46, Reply)