A wolf’s day like many others at the WSC

Diary entry, 24.10.2011, guest

Pictures of the day (2 images)   

 From the point of view of a wolf…
In the morning the trainers and the students come to the Test Building to start their working day. First they give us fresh water and we are usually very excited because often we get also some scratching and greeting and sometimes also some food. After this they start their training work with us or with the dogs and we are always having a look at what is going on around our enclosure. We always know when it’s our turn to work because they let down the bridge that connects the Testing Building to our enclosure. Than they call us by name and take one of us out to work. Usually it’s easy to take one of us out but we know how to make everything more complicated if we want to…. Our training consists of a normal training where we learn simple commands such as: sit, down, roll, turn, stay, paw and touch. Then we work at the touch-screen where we have to recognize different forms (lower levels) or discriminate different numerical quantities (higher levels), it depends on which level we are. But we are not always working at the touch-screen, we do also the ‘Learning set’, here we have to learn under which of two objects they are putting a piece of sausage. When we have learnt under which object the sausage is and we are good at recognizing it they change the two objects so we have to learn again where the food is.
Also the students are working with us and we never know what they want from us. Some of them want us to explore some objects that we have never seen before, some others want us to solve some tasks and some others are giving us enrichment to play with. Each student has his/her own project to develop and we are usually happy to participate in their experiment.
And then usually in the evening, but sometimes it happens in the morning, one or two of us go out for a walk (on the leash, of course) with a trainer, a student and one or two persons, it’s the Paid Walk.
Tuesday, however, is a special day… the humans (the WSC people: managers, trainers, students, workers, volunteers) come inside our enclosure for the Pack Meeting so we can have more close contact with them. Some of us are often licking their faces and they are scratching and patting us. We like these meetings.
So this was a description of what we wolves ‘are up to’ here at the WSC and of course the dogs are doing the same things we are doing. They are also having training sessions, consisting commands, touch-screen and learning sets. They only are not involved in the Paid Walks, but they have Pack Meetings with our humans as well.
We hope to see you soon here at the park!
The WSC’s Wolves ;)