THE METHOD I'M USING

Are llamas colour blind? Do they see in shades of grey? No-one seems to know! I don't. All I know is that they can differentiate between what humans see as colours.

March 2008

In the past three years I have done much work with Oscar and Dillon using the click 'n' reward method and the four plastic boxes shown below. The final goal was for the llama to nudge a particular one when given the relative cue..
Both boys learned first of all that nudging any box on verbal cue earned a click and grain. Easy! This was simple targeting.That took all of three minutes, literally.

Then I moved on with Oscar with the plan of getting him to select just the blue box, on cue. I started by first asking him to choose black from white, using two cardboard boxes. He readily selected the black box on cue, no matter where I put it on the table. He could obviously tell dark from pale! Then I moved onto selecting the blue box from the set of four coloured ones on the cue "Blue Box". Success! No matter where I put it on the table, he picked it out.( See video on right.)

My problems began ... and I finally abandoned the exercise ...when I tried to introduce a second colour with its own verbal and hand cue. At least, this was successful until I tried to mix them up. And then it was random success. I worked at this exercise off and on for dozens of hours, trying different methods, but in the end I had to give up. I should really have tried adding a "white" cue to the black/white exercise at the time., because when I returned to it, I found the same confusion.

Looking back, I dont think it was colour recognition that was the problem. The problem was probably the complexity of linking in the mind of the llama, the cue, both verbal and hand-signalled with the colour.