• Hello!

    Either you have not registered on this site yet, or you are registered but have not logged in. In either case, you will not be able to use the full functionality of this site until you have registered, and then logged in after your registration has been approved.

    Registration is FREE, so please register so you can participate instead of remaining a lurker....

    Please be certain that the location field is correctly filled out when you register. All registrations that appear to be bogus will be rejected. Which means that if your location field does NOT match the actual location of your registration IP address, then your registration will be rejected.

    Sorry about the strictness of this requirement, but it is necessary to block spammers and scammers at the door as much as possible.

Positive Reinforcement?

H

hapaxanth

New member
I realize that this might come off as a little ridiculous, but do you think that it is possible for a snake to be trained via positive reinforcement? I have considered attempting this with my Roxanne, because she seems calm enough to be able to focus on something other than "oh god it's the scary pink thing again" and seems very food-driven. I reckon that a corn snake is at least roughly equivalent in intelligence to a goldfish, and goldfish are easily clicker trained to do tricks that are against their instinctual nature.

I suspect that using a clicker wouldn't work (the click is loud, but I doubt it's loud enough to send vibrations strong enough to be "heard" by a snake). But positive reinforcement is all about offering a reward for doing a desired behavior--even without a clicker, it could be feasible.

I always thought that the most difficult part would be acquiring treats for the corn to give as a reward. Hard to reinforce a behavior when you only offer one food thing a week, you know? But with a larger snake pinkies might be a good, quick treat, or for the less squeamish with smaller snakes, cutting their food into little bite-size bits (this idea makes me go "eurgh," but maybe some are made of tougher stuff than I :p).

Which leads to the inevitable question: what do you teach a corn snake to do? I always thought the goldfish pushing a miniature soccer ball into a tiny net was a cute trick, and something that shouldn't be hard to get a snake to do, given their tendency to nudge most everything with their noses. Navigating an obstacle course would also be possible, or even something as simple as coming up to the side of their tank if you tap on it. Some snakes seem to already do this, coming out of hiding as soon as their tank is opened, knowing that dinner is soon to come (though Roxie won't fall for this, knowing that 6 out of 7 times I'm just coming in to mess with her and be a nuisance).

What do you think? Is it possible? What dastardly projects would you teach your snakes to do if it were?
 
This is tricky--I do believe that the intelligence of fish and snakes are different. Fish that can be trained are social animals, and interact in complex ways with other fish and people. Snakes are solitary animals, and prefer to retreat rather then interact. I'm no expert, but I think snake's coming out for food is different then training, it is more a search for food.

In my experience, which is admittedly limited, snakes interact much less directly with people then fish. Which sounds strange, but when I hold my snakes they treat me a lot like the chair I'm sitting on, and just sort of wander around. But when I look at my cichlids they come to the tank and wiggle to get my attention, they come to the side of the tank where I sit, and generally show more reaction to my presence.
 
I taught my snake to arrange himself into different geometric patterns. He's rather proficient at the triangle and heptagon, but strangely enough he can't do a solid circle.... :)

All kidding aside, all i can get my snakes to do is come out of their hides to the glass and follow a finger, and that's only when they want to. If you get anywhere with this concept, be sure to share! As for feeding small items quite often, I haven't the slightest clue if it would be detrimental in any way... Lets see what the consensus it :)
 
I tried to teach a chicken to do something, peck yes or no on a card, with the yes being green and the no being red, so really I was trying to teach her to select a color. I wasn't successful...And I _know_ they can learn that.
 
Wouldn't you have to teach her to understand English first so you could ask her questions? lol!
 
I wanted her to just always answer yes! I have taught several horses to answer yes or no. You just prick them with a nail in the neck for no, and the chest for yes. After they learn, you just touch them there and they will either shake their head no or nod yes. It's very funny to teach your (ex) husband's horse to answer questions!
 
@ doortech #1: The thing about positive reinforcement is that it doesn't necessarily require a social connection with another being. As long as the animal can connect the idea that doing this one thing gives me something I want, it can be trained. When a fish is clicker trained, it isn't that the fish is responding to their trainer because they think of the trainer as part of their school. It's as simple as, "When I do this... food comes out... hey, I like food! I'll do this again and get more!"

Fish obviously don't have the same ability for learning as dogs do, given that they don't have the same social structure as dogs. "Heel" means nothing to a fish, nor does "play," because this is something that does not come to them naturally. But behaviors that do occur to them naturally--"push with nose," "swim between two things," or "swim towards a target"--can be trained. All that positive reinforcement does is encourage the creature to perform something that it would normally do, only to do it on command (in the case of fish, whenever the ball is present, this is a command to put the ball into the net). Falcons are trained in much the same way, and they have no social structure, either. They do not bond to a human, but merely learn that coexistence means an easier meal than being on your own.

Anyway, maybe I'll give it a go and report my results. XD Here's hoping for the best.

@ Nanci: Out of curiosity, Nanci, how did you go about trying to train the chicken? Because I figure that if they can distinguish between red and green colors, that wouldn't be a hard thing to do.

@doortech #2: Do you train a dog to sit by yelling, "Sit!" and sitting down in a chair over and over again? Of course not. :p It has nothing to do with the snake being able to understand the language that you are speaking to it. You teach a dog to sit by waiting for it to sit on its own, and then praising it and giving it a treat. You do this every time the dog sits in front of you. Eventually you start saying, "Good sit! Yay!" and throwing the dog a party every time it sits. If the dog is at all motivated by the reward you are giving to it, it will start trying to figure out the system... it wants to know why it's getting the treats, and what it can do to get more! It doesn't take long for them to realize, "So when I putt my butt on the ground, my human is happy and gives me nice things," and will do it over and over again. By saying "Sit!" every time they sit, they eventually connect the word with the behavior.

You could be shouting, "Cheese and bananas!" at them for all that they care--if you shouted that every time they sat and got a treat, that dog is going to sit every time you say cheese and bananas. The same is true of other, less intelligent creatures. If you give them the appropriate stimulus (i.e. a soccer ball appearing in the tank) they will give the correct response if they want the treat (i.e. pushing the ball into the net.)
 
I think I had the sign on the washing machine, and would put a treat on YES to get her to peck it. It was a long time ago. She lived in the house for a few weeks because it was winter, and her crop burst open and had to be sewn up so she had to live in the house while it healed. I sure miss that bird. Her name was Jewel.
 
I think the problem with that method is that the treat is either there or it isn't. If the treat isn't there, there's no reason to peck at the sign. If, on the other hand, she pecks at something and a treat magically appears out the sky (that is to say, you drop the treat for her), there is always a reason to peck at the green sign. Even if there isn't a treat on there right at that moment, pecking it might still yield a treat, but pecking the red sign never yields a treat, so there's no reason to bother.

She sounds like a wonderful creature, though. I really like chickens. :) They make such pretty sounds and seem to have distinctive personalities.
 
I would try to teach it something. I might be very hard and time consuming though but could pay off in the end.

I read in a few of the books that I have that if your snake escapes and if you put it back in it's cage and didn't fix how it escaped that it would escape in a fraction of the time that it took the first time.

Other people say their snake recognizes them and treats other people that handle it differently. If this is true, this is evidence of some form of retained learning.

Trying positive reinforcement with a snake might be harder in that you can't really give it a treat like you can a dog. You might though be able to dangle the food and make the snake go through a certain pathway or where ever you want it to go and move the food just ahead of it and make it chase it.
I don't know if you could remove the food from the scenario and get the snake to do that 'trick' though. Try some things and let us know.
 
I think you would have a hard time training an animal that acts only on survival. A dog will do a lot of the things that you train it to do, in one way or another, naturally in its life. Dogs sit, roll over, stand up, and play on their own, and anything we teach them is based on its natural actions to begin with.

Every move the snake makes is either to regulate its temperature, hide from predators, find a way out of its box, procreate, or find food. I suppose you could train them to do something based on their natural behavior, but using one of their basic drives to achieve another would be confusing IMO.

Leading a snake through a maze with a mouse could be seen as training it, but the real test would be to see if the snake remembers the route of the maze when the mouse isn't there, or if it would rather satisfy its need to find a nice corner within it to hide, or the right temperature seeing as the urge to hunt wouldn't be present without the prey.

I'm not saying it's impossible to train a snake, but i think it would bounce from one instinct to the other, without a chance to associate the action with the positive reinforcement.

Plus, in the last how many years that people have been keeping snakes, has anyone heard of a performing snake?
 
The only kind of treat that I've managed to think of so far are droplets of broth. I've heard that some people will try to get a fussy eater to eat by dipping a mouse in chicken broth, so I figure snakes must like the scent and taste of it. It would be easy enough to use a micropipetter to give her drops of it as a reward. I am worried about possible health consequences, however--lord knows that in the process of training a dog you give it a _lot_ of kibble and biscuits, and I don't know that filling her up with sodium-rich chicken broth is a great idea.

I don't know that rolling over or shaking hands is a behavior that would come naturally to a dog "in the wild." These are tricks that would not be useful in a survival situation, and mean nothing in the dog world (rolling onto your belly and playing dead is useful as a submissive behavior, but rolling over only to jump right back up is not). Yet it's still a trick that a dog can be trained to do. I think that in the same way a snake might be trained to push something with its nose or come up to the glass. They already push things with their noses--all I would be trying to do is to encourage them to do it at a particular moment in time. But of course this is all theoretical until I can figure out a good way of going about this.

As for trained snakes, I definitely remembering reading a post on here that mentioned a very unusual snake. They said that he was the only snake they had that seemed to enjoy being taken out, dancing in front of the glass until someone took him out. And she mentioned that he could do some seven or so tricks, one of them being to come to the front of his tank whenever someone tapped on the glass. But she never mentioned specifically training him, or at least I don't remember her saying so. And there are some performing snakes, if you count snake charmers--again, I don't know that the behavior has been specifically trained, but it is true that the snake is responding to a certain stimulus with a particular reaction.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top