Poultry in Motion

Improve your mechanical skill and understanding of training basics by clicker training a chicken!

Terry Ryan's introduction to clicker training occurred in the late 70's at a Karen Pryor course. Her early association with Karen Pryor was inspirational. In 1979, Terry completed her first "real" clicker project, a hearing dog. In the mid 1980's Terry hosted and taught Legacy's International Behavior and Training Camps. Students trained rats and dogs. The transition from rats to chickens occurred in 1993 when Ingrid Kang Shallenberger (formerly of Sea Life Park in Hawaii) and Terry started to team teaching the first few "chicken training" camps. In the late 1990's Legacy invited Marian Breland-Bailey and Bob Bailey to come out of retirement to teach the chicken unit at Legacy's camps. The Baileys brought a great deal of experience and expertise to the courses and soon began teaching chicken-only operant conditioning courses in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In 2006 Bob Bailey began teaching his courses at Legacy's training center in Sequim, Washington.

Terry has been using chickens as models for training in her various courses ever since. Some of Legacy's local continuing education courses have a prerequisite of a short course on chicken training!

Terry's Poultry In Motion class July 9-10, 2008 will be two six-hour days focusing on mechanical skill and learning science. Each student will be issued one or two chickens each. The hands-on chicken's portion of the course will consist of 10 minute training sessions that will total approximately four contact hours. The remainder of the time will consist of planning and learning about the exercises we will teach the chickens.

Included will be three or more activities (or sit-down lessons) from this list: Systematic desensitization, shaping, discrimination, criteria setting, extinction. Overshadowing, Premack Principle, and much more.

The curriculum remains plastic enough for student to request a certain behavior be included. Dogs are not included in this workshop.

The cost for this course is $200.00 Please contact the Legacy office for registration information.

Coming from out of town? Click here for information on traveling to and lodging in Sequim!