Episode 131: What Do You Do With Unwanted Behavior?

We recorded this podcast on January 13, a week after the attack on the Capital and the day the House of Representatives was debating the Articles of Impeachment. We’re publishing it on the Martin Luther King Day Holiday, just two days before the Inauguration in what hopefully will be a peaceful transfer of power. We know many people reading this will be wanting to run away at this point. They’re thinking - enough! I listen to these podcasts to get away from the news. I don’t want to run into it here!

We absolutely understand that. This is an episode about training horses. But we were both really shaken by the events of last week. We don’t want to pretend that nothing has happened, that these events are not going on. We need to be paying attention, and so what we chose to talk about in this podcast was what to do with unwanted behavior.

This is a training subject. It seems like the most appropriate topic that we could pick at a time like this. It doesn’t matter which side of the political divide you’re on, the other side is presenting behavior you don’t want. As clicker trainers we’ve been trying to figure out what do you do when you’re presented with behavior you don’t want. That’s what we’ll be exploring in this podcast. The conversation is very much focused on our animal learners, but who knows, through them we may be learning skills that will ripple into our interactions with family, friends, work colleagues, and on into the broader community. Let’s hope so. These skills are very much needed to help calm these very turbulent times we are living through.