New member, raising some therapy project chickens, out in Minnesota!

[elenfair]

Howdy!

New to the flock, not entirely new to chickens, but new to raising them here in Minnesota and in an urban setting. Fun times! We just moved in three young pullets into their new digs yesterday -- a calm New Hampshire, a mellow black cochin, and a spirited little wellie. As expected, they checked out their big run for a while, quickly found the ramp up to their coop, and decided to camp out up there. Big world, little birds! And lots of changes, all in one day! All of them are pretty willing to be petted and cooed to, everyone is eating and drinking well up in the coop, and that's good enough for now.

My 6 year old, who is an animal lover and pretty proficient trainer of all *sorts* of critters, plans to clicker train these chickens to do visual discrimination tasks and also to do pet therapy work in both a memory care unit (with seniors) and in her children's hospital (where she, herself, spends a lot of time). Everyone's pretty excited! These little chicks will be getting plenty of love and gentle training, that's for sure.

Kiddo is supposed to start keeping a blog for her project. We'll likely start it up this weekend. If people are interested in keeping up with the Therapy Chickens, let us know!

So happy to be here, and I'm sure we'll have tons of questions as we go. It's been a while since I've had feathery friends nearby. Many thanks to Minniechickmama for putting up with us and helping us out with this nifty project! (She's the bomb.)

 

[TwoCrows]

Hello there and welcome to BYC!

Chickens are very smart and will no doubt become clicker trained fast. My quail, whom have much smaller brains than my chickens, LOL, are clicker trained to go into the coop when I need them in there. If they can learn, I am sure your chickens will learn too. Sounds like fun!

Make yourself at home here and if you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask around the forums.

Welcome to our flock!

 

[elenfair]

Thanks!

They do train really well. There's a legendary operant conditioning trainer -- for dogs -- who perfects other trainers' clicker training ability by making them practice with chickens. Nothing will hone your clicker skills and chaining skills like working with chickens: speed, accuracy, and no time to babble (which people are prone to doing with dogs), and no physical handling (because most people are awkward with chickens anyway. Ha.) They're surprisingly quick learners!

The little gals are getting used to the new place. For now, they're remaining cooped up and poking at each other some (no surprise there) mostly because they *can*. Much huddling and snuggling under the cochin who, right now, is mellow but a little flighty (I suspect her mellow nature led her to be more easily picked on). The Wellie is a friendly little bird and pretty fearless, despite being a tiny bit younger than the other two. She holds her own. So far, the NHR is being the queen of all things. We'll see how their little personalities develop over time.

 

[Mountain Peeps]

Welcome to BYC! Please make yourself at home and we are here to help.

Wow! Training chickens with a clicker! I've never heard of such a thing. I'll be excited to hear if it all works smoothly. Definitely keep us posted! That's great that your daughter likes to train animals. At this young and she's already doing so much, she may end up being a professional animal trainer!

 

[drumstick diva]

Years ago I recall reading about a woman who clicker trained chickens. There is also a youtube video of chickens doing "agility work," scaled down from what dogs do.

 

[elenfair]

Chickens learn surprisingly fast and are particularly good at visual discrimination. All domesticated or semi-domesticated critters can be trained using operant conditioning, to some degree. There's a woman I know who has successfully trained *goldfish* to retrieve, using worm treats, using a modified clicker approach (I think she uses a laser pointer?) Food rewards are a powerful motivator for any beast. I mean, I can shape my husband's behavior with pizza...

 

[BantamFan4Life]

Welcome to BYC! I'm glad you joined us!