In their training jobs, animals have long been trained for pure entertainment. Generations of children have felt the thrill of placing a penny in the tiny paw of the organ-grinder’s monkey. Crowds have watched as the snake charmer mesmerized his deadly companion. There have been dancing bears and prancing horses, dogs that can do somersaults, performing chimps, elephants, and parrots who recited rhymes. Circuses used trained animals long before zoos were common. The training of animals began thousands of years ago for very practical purposes; there is evidence that dogs may have been the first animals to be domesticated. They were used by Stone Age Europeans to help hunt down wild game for food. Then when tribes banded together in agricultural communities, dogs were trained to herd other domesticated animals, such as goats and sheep, and to stand guard at campsites and outside of dwellings. The ancient Egyptians are known to have bred special qualities into dogs intended for specific purposes.
In a training job, early humans quickly saw the advantages of training larger animals to do much of the heavy labor involved in farming and building. Horses, water buffalo, elephants, and camels are among the animals used by various cultures to pull wagons and plows and to carry heavy loads. They also served as the sole means of transportation, carrying passengers on their backs or drawing wheeled carts and carriages. This was the best way of transportation until animals were replaced by engine-driven vehicles. Animal training today is still an important activity. Some animals are trained simply to be well-behaved pets, others for sports or entertainment. Still others are taught to do useful work. Humankind’s first animal friend, the dog, for example, can be found doing police work, guiding the blind, guarding valuable property, and working with farm animals.
Many different animals are trainable and can easily be tamed and commanded with special techniques that can be applied to dogs, horses, lions, bears, elephants, parakeets, cockatoos, whales, porpoises, and seals. Although most of those animals are seemingly different, there are still key points and basic principles being applied that are the same for each animal. Most animals regardless of what kind they are are placed into a routine application of techniques to train them. Likewise in their training careers, these highly trained and skillful animal trainers have been designing a special program and effective approach that generate learning reinforcement from the animals under training condition. Ivan Pavlov’s reward and punishment has also been into consideration. Repetitive exercises and other reward-reinforcing techniques have been constantly employed with patience.
Prior to its training activities and formal program, the trainers conduct an evaluation test in assessing the animal’s temperamental condition, its natural mood and abilities, and its whole responsive and aptitude characteristics to determine if such animal will likely pass the training sessions. Note that there are animals that are seemingly resistant and even violently reactive to a new condition, and once they are observed to be non-adoptive to the training approaches they shall not be forced. However, repetitive learning methods can be applied, added with reward system to enhance obedience, the animal can always easily learn to adopt a new learning condition that sets a new behavior to react a certain stimuli and command. In some training programs, trainers come in and work with the animals, where as in other programs, such as the companion animal program, the animal lives with the trainer for the duration of the program. Trainers usually specialize in one type of animal and are identified by this type of animal. Dog trainers, for example, may work with police dogs, training them to search for drugs or missing people. The programs to train drug-detecting dogs use different detection responses, but each dog is trained in only one response system.
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