The Benefits of Recording Your Training Session
Recording your training has so many benefits. I do it consistently with all my training sessions; even the ones with my dogs! One of the biggest reasons I record my training sessions is just in case the session does not go as anticipated; I can review it to see what went wrong. No trainer is perfect. I love to showcase my flaws online proudly. Also, no animal is perfect, especially working with undomesticated animals. Any animal is unpredictable. Recording your training sessions and watching them allows you to pin point subtle body language cues or environmental mistakes we made that contributed to the session being the way it was.
Recordings help us be better trainers. Being able to rewatch our sessions and see potential flaws, or areas of improvement, is very powerful to our growth as a trainer. In a professional training environment, like when I am contracted out by zoo’s, keepers rarely train independently. They usually have another keeper with them watching, like our phones would be recording us. Both instances, the trainer gets feedback.
Trainers need feedback beyond just what the animal is giving through body language because when we are training, there are a lot of variables that we need to consider and juggle that take up a part of our perception. We cannot be as focused as someone whose job it is to purely watch us train, like another keeper or our phone. What two keepers have is the ability to talk back and forth about the session, and what you can do is send the videos to Fluff and Feathers to talk back and forth with!
I always recommend for clients to send me their training videos. I have a list of clients that send me every single training session they do. With every client on that list, I have been able to give valuable feedback to them to dramatically improve the training that they are doing with their animal. Some clients record every training session, but if nothing huge happens, they simply delete the video. That is fine too! Having the recording on just in case is the rout to go because you never know when you will want it on and regret not having it on.
Another great reason to record your training sessions is to look back on the progress you have made. A lot of training is subtle for a while. For example, if you are working with me to get your bird to step up onto your hand, there are so many other subtle behaviors that goes along with it to create this big behavior. Some behaviors we may need to work on first is desensitizing the hand, creating positive relations with the hand, target training, approaching the hand, one foot up, to feet up, step off, increasing duration on the hand using small approximations, increasing distance away from the cage or perch once stepped up, so on and so forth. You think to step a bird up it’s just one behavior, and for some birds it is. For others, there is a long list to get through in order to fully resolve the behavioral concerns and decrease the chances of getting bit. Getting bit accomplishes nothing, and it is highly undesirable for both parties.
Continuing with this example, someone might be working on a lot of desensitization, but the bird still won’t step up onto the hand. If you looked back on your training sessions when you feel defeated, you can see that the bird used to run away or attack your hand when you approached, and now the bird is very calm. Though the bird is not to the point in their training to step up, that is already a huge behavioral change right there! I know without recording my training sessions I likely would have given up on my basset hound’s scent training. Her growth was so subtle that when I looked back on sessions, I said “wow!”
Training session recordings are a great behavior log to keep track of. If we need to amend the training plan, having that log and video information as to what worked, for how long, or how it did not work and why, really helps me modify our approach for your individual bird. Training brings us so much information about the bird, yourselves, and the behavior we are working on. I always tell clients I am pretty good at my job, but with the information available at the beginning, I may not choose the right plan of action. Having even more data continues to improve the suggestions and plans I give in the future.
Sometimes when explaining how the training session went to me, you may explain the situation incorrectly. Things like labels and anthropomorphism is huge when we are talking about our animals. “My dog is aggressive” to me is a dog that is relentless charging and biting and attacking. To you, it may be that your dogs’ hackles went up, or maybe they growled. That is how labels can be perceived as something completely different than you were wanting to say. I usually stop clients when I see a label being used and ask them to describe the behavior more in depth to avoid this confusion. I have clients say “my bird bit me but after you could see it in their face that they didn’t mean to.” How? What a lot of clients perceive as “guilt” is generally the animal showing fear response. By communicating incorrectly, or not in depth enough, or relying on emotions in your description, can cause me to come up with possibly another plan that is not quite right for your individual animal.
Recordings are straight forward. This is what happened, come look at it. I am happy to be training in a digital world for this feedback. Even when relying on another trainer to feedback, there are still personal opinions, things missed, and possibly incorrect feedback being relayed and discussed. The camera takes that all way. You can slow the clip down, pause it, analyze stills, and even still talk to another trainer (me!) to gather data. If you have training videos, feel free to send them over to me through email!