Episode 60: Sarah Owings Pt 4: The Dance of Cues

We’ve come to the last installment of our conversation with Sarah Owings. In the previous episodes we looked at two different ways of thinking about building cues. In one the handler works hard to remove any body language hints. In the other the handler acknowledges that animals are super observant so she lets the cues evolve out of the shaping process. We ended the previous episode with this statement: "Our conversation has brought us to a milestone. We have reached this recognition that our animals are communicating to us and we can allow their behavior to modify ours." So now it’s time to see where these two different models for teaching cues takes us.