For the episode we’re heading to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo for a conversation with Rick Hester, Amy Schilz and Lucy Butler.

Rick is the Curator of Behavioral Husbandry for the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado. He oversees all the zoo's behavioral programming. His work includes the zoo's animal training for husbandry, medical, and public show behaviors, enrichment, developing programs to improve problem behavior situations, the zoo's formal animal welfare assessments, and exhibit design for behavior goals.

We’re also joined by Amy Schilz who has the dream job of working with the Cheyanne Mountain zoo’s giraffe.

Amy is the Senior Animal Behaviorist for Cheyenne Mountain Zoo's International Center for the Care and Conservation of Giraffe, where she runs giraffe workshops and conferences, both stateside and internationally.

Both Rick and Amy also partner with Dr. Susan Friedman and her Behavior Works consulting team so you’ll hear a lot of references to Susan throughout this conversation.

In addition to Rick and Amy, I invited Lucy Butler to join us. Lucy and her husband run the River Haven Animal Sanctuary in Rhode Island. I knew she would have a lot of questions for Rick and Amy. When you take in animals who are the victims of abuse, there’s a lot to be learned from the work that goes on in zoos to reduce the stress of handling and also to improve the overall quality of life for the animals under their care.

In this episode Rick and Amy talk about fine-tuning what a “no response” looks like and what handlers should do when they see the first signs of an animal saying “no”. As they fine tuned their understanding of “no” responses, they were actually describing an operationalized behavior that is “yes”. What does it look like for an animal to say “yes”

Assent is a behavior the learner performs and continues to perform that lets us know we can continue. When they stop performing that behavior, assent is withdrawn, so we have to withdraw. This is the process that the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo trainers follow. Relief is readily available to the animal learners. Across species in a system where relief is abundantly available and there are strong reinforcers at a high rate for opting in, most animals opt in more and opt out less.

After Rick and Amy describe the training that they are doing at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, we switch the focus to horse training. Letting horses opt out runs counter to traditional horse training methods. But certainly we know that horses also opt in more when they have the option of saying “no”.

This episode also includes an announcement for my new book: “Never Get A Wizard Mad At You”: Book One in the Upstairs Armadillo Series.