WEEK TWO

Another week has gone by since I began this challenge and things are going very well! Here's another picture of Schwartz if anyone cares. 

This week, I chose two more tricks that I wanted to teach Schwartz. I decided to teach her to stand up and to go through a hoop. She caught on to both tricks very quickly. Although, she was in a very hyper mood today, so I wasn't able to capture her standing up on camera. I did however get her going through a hoop. The sound kind of lags in it, but oh well. Here's the video...

To teach Schwartz this trick, I simply placed her in front of the "hoop" (it's actually just a roll of duck tape with pickles on it) and placed a treat in front of the hoop. When she would go through the hoop, I said "through" and after awhile, she caught on. 

The other trick I taught her was to stand up. All I did to teach her this was hold a treat above her head and when she reached up to get it, I would say "up." Although I didn't get this on camera this week, I will post it next week. 

Some of the struggles I've dealt with this week are that at first I would get really frustrated with her when she wouldn't cooperate. But, then I realized that if she's not cooperating, she's probably bored and there is no use trying to get her do something she doesn't want to because then, it's no longer fun for her. After this realization, I started shortening her training sessions and have seen much more progress since. As I mentioned last week, she gets very distracted easily. Here's and example of her doing so...

I was trying to get her to do a trick, but instead she decided she wanted to go in this tent that I have for her. So, she was hanging off the edge of my shelf so I grabbed the camera and was able to capture her losing her balance and falling off. Don't worry though, it wasn't that high off the ground. She's chosen to jump off of much higher pieces of furniture in my room. (:

Just Getting the Hang of It

Hi everyone! For my first 30 Day Challenge, I decided to teach my pet rat, Schwartz, some tricks. To start out with some background information, I got Schwartz on Valentine's Day this year and she is amazing. She is a dumbo rat which is basically the same thing as a regular rat except she has big ears. She's about a year old and is very intelligent. 

Training Schwartz was surprisingly tricky. I did a lot of research prior and read that because of how smart rats are, its fairly easy to train them, but apparently that's just not the case with Schwartz. Training with treats is the most common (and supposedly easiest) way to train a rat, but i found that Schwartz typically doesn't respond to treats because she will not take them in certain settings. Another way that I read about is clicker training. This way she will associate a treat with the sound of a clicker and then doing the action I want her to with the sound of the clicker. But, I'm too cheap to actually buy a clicker so I found that you can also just make a "clucking" sound with your tongue and it works just the same. So far I've been able to teach Schwartz to beg for her treat and to jump into my arms. If you want to see her doing these, you can look at the videos below, but if you don't really care that is fine too. (: 

This is the first trick I taught her. I did this by giving her a treat and saying "beg" every time she came to the front of her cage. This trick took a couple days, but she finally will "beg" for a treat on command. You will hear me make the clucking sound in this video that I explained earlier. I'm not crazy, it actually works. (: 

This is the second trick I taught Schwartz. She absolutely loves to jump, so every time she would jump on me, I would say jump and eventually she was able to do it on command. This was probably the easier trick to teach her because she already jumps on me pretty often.

The one major difficulty I've been having when training her is that she has the attention span of a goldfish. She is constantly stopping her training to clean herself or chew things. The worst things she has done so far was at one point she stopped so she could try and rip up my carpet. Another time, I almost got a trick down with her but she had to stop to give herself a bath and then give me a "bath" by licking my face. 

Within the next week, I would like to try and find a new trick to that is a little more complex that I can teach her.