New tasks at the WSC

Diary entry, 26.04.2011, Ewelina Utrata

Pictures of the day (2 images)   

Everybody is kept busy by all different kinds of work. And this is true for both humans and wolves. Since we started our little Wolf-Shop a while ago, we had the chance to make a lot of young and adult visitors happy with our diverse selection of souvenirs.
The last days some visitors already had the chance to watch our wolves during their new mysterious task – training on a buzzer. Surprised, confused and laughing faces were what we got during their performance. What was the background for it? Training for a game show? Well, not exactly… Right now the animals are trained to push a button (buzzer) to create a sound. The reason for this is that later the wolves will need it for a discrimination task. In this task they will have to choose between two options. Shaping this behaviour proved to be an interesting challenge. Some of the wolves were a bit anxious at the beginning; we had curious and interested wolves, motivated and focussed animals, and we had Kaspar….
He was the one wolf, who was the reason for beads of sweat on my forehead. Completely focused on the buzzer he approached it and decided to check the solidity of the apparatus.
Thanks to the high quality of the button it was able to survive Kaspar’s curiosity.
Therefore, the training my continue…