Man's best friend will always have a special place in most people's hearts. Our four legged companions can show such loyalty, love, affection, and companionship towards us; those are characteristics that dog owners live for! As humans seem to like doing with anything we're proud of, we also like to show off our pets a little bit too. A few "ooh your dog is so cute!" and "what a precious little thing" can make a dog owners day. It gets all the sweeter when they're well behaved, but what about if they're a genius...?
Skidboot (born in 1972 of owner David Hartwig) was nothing short of "genius." Winning $25,000 on Animal Planet's "Pet Star" and even making an appearance on Oprah, Skidboot can wow audiences from 2 to 90 yrs old with his ability to understand plain English. (See video below)
As we look more closely at Skidboot and his interactions with his owner we can start to see how Skidboot accomplishes this seemingly "genius" feat. In several other videos, owner David shows how he has trained Skidboot to do what he does: through simple operant conditioning. By offering verbal and tactile praise (positive reinforcement) David is able to teach Skidboot each individual portion of an act (the one that won him $25,000 too). By chaining together many small tasks (likely shaping those tasks as well) Skidboot seems to go from a dog that only fetches to a dog that "understands the English language".
Yes it's cute. Enjoy it, but sorry to ruin the magic; Skidboot is a cute dog with a patient trainer who knows the art of operant conditioning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYczb_I7QKk
I'm a total dog lover, so I was immediately interested in your post! It is simply amazing what conditioning can do, and it makes me think about the phrase "There are no bad dogs, only bad owners." With the correct patience and conditioning methods, dogs (and many other animals) can be taught to do so many varied and controlled things. The only thing that confused me in this post was that you said Skidboot was born in 1972, yet the clip was from the 2000s, making him the oldest dog...ever! Other than that fact, great post!
That's amazing! I also love animals. I have cats and dogs back home and they all live in harmony together. When I was a kid my parents bought me a dog and a cat. As a kid I had an interest in training my dog to do stuff. The way I trained the dog was operant conditioning, I didn't know nothing about it at that time everything was intuitive. The first trick I tried to train my dog was to bring stuff that I throw back to me. During training sessions the cat was always around us. It was difficult and time consuming, so I gave up after some time, with no results. After a couple of years I threw something by accident, and instead of my dog going after it my cat fetched it and brought it me. I was shocked. I did it for a couple more times and the cat repeated, and since then I always play with my cat instead of my dog.
I have two dogs of my own, so I was immediately interested in your post. I found the discussion of training dogs through operant conditioning in lecture was so interesting that I wanted to try it with my new puppy that I got earlier last year (my other dog is too old to do anything but lay down and sleep). I first tried to train her to just sit, since being a puppy this is a hard thing for her, and I was surprised at how quickly it has started to work. Now I have been interested in what else I can teach her. I think that being able to condition or even the talk about shaping in lecture animals and pets is an amazing discovery.
This is pretty awesome. It seems that the dog does, in fact, know English. But it looks like you're right, it is just plain old operant conditioning. My family and I have been able to get our cats to meow whenever we say their names through a sort of operant conditioning. It's interesting seeing what animals will and won't do. Here's a cat barking, I'm not sure if it's operant conditioning or not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP3gzee1cps
I have had dogs my whole life and find this video to be pretty sweet. I have also been training my dogs through operant conditioning over the years without knowledge of the importance of this discovery by Skinner. It is crazy how the knowledge we take for granted now, used to be unknown to humans just years ago.