29 July 05

Clicker Training Squirrels

The new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory features forty trained squirrels, all opening walnuts with their teeth, sitting in a pristine room. Tim Burton was adamant about using live squirrels rather than computer graphics (fur looks cheesy in CG).

According to this article, many of the squirrels were bottle fed from babies and then trained using the standard operand conditioning.

I’m trying to teach our cats to come when called. This is difficult because they come anyway if they think there’s a treat in it for them, but it does seem to be working. I can get them to come from another room now.

A woman on the cat clicker list is training a bobcat kitten that has suffered head trauma and is not releasable. Within one minute, this biting, unhappy feline was putting nose to target. Within three minutes, it was jumping over a log.

For animals that are confined, this is not a circus trick. It gets them to exercise their minds and their bodies and to communicate with humans. Wilbur the bobcat can do a tremendous amount of good in captivity if he can be used for education purposes—which he can, once he stops biting.

Posted by at 09:21 PM in Critters | Link |
  1. I remember seeing a program about squirrels learning to negotiate obstacle courses to find food – i think it narrated by David Attenborough. You can see some of their antics at http://www.squirrels.org/video.html if you have broadband. I loved watching them when I was in England – even though I know grey squirrels are a pest over there – they are still amazing. Our possums don’t get themselves into quite as much mischief.
    — Jenny    29. July 2005, 22:43    Link
  2. The first time I thought about the prospect of trained squirrels was on a bike ride from Palo Alto into Stanford, maybe 15 years ago. All of the squirrels in the universe seemed to have gathered in the trees to the right of the path, and with chorus-line choreography they ran out of these trees and darted across the path just as I approached. Was it attempted suicide on a lemmingoid scale? Was it just some response to air currents I was creating? Perhaps Tim Burton was lurking with a camera nearby, and I’d just blundered into his shoot …
    — Jarrett    29. July 2005, 23:23    Link
  3. Those squirrels are part of the reason I want to see that movie. :)
    — Rana    3. August 2005, 17:18    Link

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