Grimm's Behavior Paper

My goal behavior was to teach my rat, Grimm, to play fetch by bringing a ball to me. I created a training plan that involved a minimum of two training sessions per day for 30 days. Through my training plan she should complete this behavior on day 25. I planned to accomplish this behavior by using a clicker, treats and a target (ball). Through a training plan, positive reinforcement, dedication and modifications to the training plan, Grimm should have learned to play fetch. The training plan steps to teach Grimm to play fetch were pretty reasonable. By the first day of training, I predicted that she would sniff the ball. Since rats are typically very curious animals, she did this naturally on the first day. By the third day of training,
For the first 14 days of her training, she would not eat a single reinforcer I gave her. This made it extremely difficult to reinforce her doing the right thing in training. She refused to eat a total of 24 different reinforcers out of the 28 I offered her. I tried sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, dried fruit, banana, apple and many more types of reinforcers. All four of the reinforcers that she would actually take and eat; I found during the last half of her training. On the ninth day of training I realized that Grimm worked a lot better when Cookies (my other rat) was present. So I would train Grimm with Cookies nearby. Doing this made Grimm a lot more confident, however, she would get distracted by Cookies and lose focus. Another issue is that I didn’t always train Grimm in the same place in my room. I tried my bathtub, bathroom floor, bedroom floor and her cage. This made her more curious to explore than to train. To reduce distractions I finally began training her in a glass aquarium that only contained her
I learned that every animal is trained a different way. I learned that some animals will be more difficult to train than others. Throughout the training, I noticed how much different training a bird is to training a rodent. I believe it is due to the intelligence and problem solving abilities of birds. In some ways, Grimm proved to be the exception to the common rat. Most rodents are very food motivated, however Grimm was not. She was not motivated by human interaction either. I am still struggling to find her motivation. The motivations of food and love were not strong enough motivators for her. I gathered more experience training animals. I will continue to train Grimm regardless of if the semester is over until she performs her