Have you been accused of luring? I have and I am proud to say….so what? 😊 It is a very valid tool in our training tool kit. It is simply a prompt to get action started. However, once I have built reinforcement history for the action I want (say for example going to a station) I start to phase out luring and give the animal a chance to think about what action it is doing that has been paired with getting those goodies. Often what you will see is the animal will offer the desired behavior. When you see that happening you know it’s time to switch to delivering food after the behavior is presented. You can also start trying to predict when the behavior will be offered and insert a cue. Often this can occur in one session. A quick transition is the goal so that the animal learns to move past focusing on where food is coming from and think about the action it is doing that causes food to appear. Even if I prompted stationing with a target, I often transition to phasing out the target and using a cue instead. They really are just both tools to help me get the action I want started so that I can reinforce. So do I lure?…..heck yeah! Do I get well trained behaviors fast? Yup. Here is a session with some bat eared foxes using this strategy to get station training started from some recent work with @zoopoznan Poznan Zoo. As is usually the case, in just one very short session we were seeing great results. #batearedfox #stationtraining #foxtraining #luring #batearedfoxtraining https://www.instagram.com/p/B28OHrClrYY/?igshid=y07lushzxvqd