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ABOUT ME
(...and an apology!)
REWRITTEN
APRIL 2010
Hello. My name
is Terry Crowfoot and I live with my husband in Hampshire in the south
of England with two cats and a Shire horse. I also own just seven
llamas and one alpaca.
I am keenly interested in the training of these animals, two in particular,
and this is what this website sets out to describe.
I apologise for the quality of this site; I was born long before computers
were invented. Though I hope you can find (..er..navigate..) your
way around, it is obviously an amateurish home-made effort and will
maybe convince you that my interest lies more in training llamas than
in website design! |
How
I got involved
I had no interest in llama training when I bought my first pair of llamas
a few years ago. Indeed, I bought them merely as easy-to-care-for animals
which would graze and grace our fields and provide companionship for our
Shire horse
who had lost his companion. Some two years into ownership and whilst surfing
the Internet one evening, I came across an American site on which I read
an account of llamas, who, it was claimed, had been trained to pick up
litter, clearing up after a school fete. I chuckled, dismissed the whole
story as a bit of harmless American fantasy and then moved on.
Some months later, whilst again casually visiting some of the llama websites
which the Americans do so well, I came upon another strange story. This
time the llamas were "collecting hoops out of buckets,""
fetching their own head-collars" and "ringing bells." I
decided to investigate this ridiculous story further!
My investigations led me to into much fascinating reading, or rather re-reading,
of the work done by the behaviourist Burrhus Skinner, whose experiments
I had been forced to study decades ago as part of my educational psychology
course at college. This time I had a real interest.( For those of you
who wish to know a bit about his work, I have made a separate page
on operant conditioning since it's a bit heavy on a site that
is intended to be fun.)
It
was the work of Jim Logan of Snowdridge Llamas in the States that finally
decided me to start training llamas. With his wife Amy, Jim had worked
extensively with llamas using operant conditioning. Jim and Amy have achieved
great things but it is sad that they have only used the medium of entertainment-style
videos to describe their work, when they clearly have the knowledge and
experience to come up with a far more serious and detailed piece of literature
on their subject.
In the
llama world I have had much thought-provoking advice from Sue Curliss
in Australia, Sue Ailsby in Canada and Jim Krowka from Oregon, USA. I
haven't always followed their advice, but have always learnt something
from it.
I have
read a fair amount about operant conditioning as used to train animals,
particularly dogs and horses. Amongst others, Alexandra Kurland has made
a great contribution in this field. But it is Karen Pryor author, of "Dont
Shoot the Dog", who has had probably had the greatest influence on
my approach.. Karen has worked extensively with dolphins and other animals
in USA, using operant conditioning methods. Sadly she has never tried
llamas!
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