Training Tigers

This is a picture of myself (Valerie) and Jeri (our Program Coordinator) training with Izzy. We have trained Izzy to stand up and put his paws on the mesh so that we can inspect his paws. He is easily susceptible to blisters that need to be medicated before they become painful. When he stands we can put medication on his front paws to keep them from getting infected. Typically he doesn't mind as long as he's getting chicken.

When we train our cats it's to help medical procedures to be less stressful on them and also to keep them thinking and from getting bored. We NEVER punish the cats we always reward them for the things they do correctly. Also we try to end each session on a positive note so the cat will enjoy it more. We use a clicker to let the animal know when they have done the behavior asked and then we positively reinforce them. I was a Psychology major so this is very exciting to me!

I started practicing my training skills on Izzy and now we are trying to work with Alexis. Alexis has caught on very quickly! Sometimes Izzy or Alexis doesn't have the attention span to concentrate so we keep the session short, but today both of them did very well! I don't have a picture of us training Alexis but here is a picture of her playing with a sugar bag with meat in it!

Don't forget to help us raise money by using Goodsearch! It's totally free to use but everytime you search we recieve a penny. If we can get as many people as possible to use the search engine we could raise a lot of money to help out the tigers! Thanks for all of your support!