Grant's training session, Khristine's cage, and conclusion

So Grant had a very interesting training session with Meeka on Saturday, with relatively good results. It was pretty starightforward: he sat down with her for an hour and let her continue to bite him. From what I understand, she would approach and bite him, and then he would scruff her and put her back down. THIS LASTED AN HOUR! Now I don't generally think that intense hour long training sessions like this work, but he said he just kind of lost track of time. And as she could've easily left the room and he would've left her alone, she didn't. Maybe she viewed it as a game or some kind of battle of wits, I'm not really sure. The end result was this: by then end she would approach him but not bite. So this tells me that maybe we just need to up the ante a bit and lengthen our training sessions. Instead of waiting for the behavior to happen, put her in the situation where the behavior happens repeatedly and show her that this is the result, every time. In the long term, it resulted in her biting him far less than she previously did. However, she still bites me, so maybe I need to try this one out myself?

(A Grant and Meeka session. She'e not actually biting as hard as it seems)

My one and only (and most awesome) follower, Khristine, had a great idea the other day. She explained to me that when they sent her nephew to his bedroom, he didn't really care until they unplugged his T.V., and then all hell breaks lose. She equated this with the problem I had been experiencing with Meeka that I mentioned in a previous post about how she doesn't seem to view her cage as a punishment anymore, and suggested I put her in her carrier for time outs instead. I think this is a great idea! My only problem is that when I tried to do it I discovered that my carrier was warped from taking it apart and putting it back together so many times, so as soon as I can get a new carrier, I'm going to try this. Now this may make it difficult for future carrier trips if she sees it as a punishment, but those are ffew and far between and this is a risk I'm willing to take.

(Meeka, trying to give me a guilt trip while on a time out)

So this is my last post before I pass in my case study..I definitely feel that the training I have done has come a long way in improving Meeka's aggression. I mean, she isn't perfect, and by no means would I trust her around a stranger yet. However, I feel much more comfortable around her than I did when we first got her. During the first week I remember thinking "What have I done? What kind of insane monster have I let into my house?". I don't feel that way anymore. I would never have tried to approach her then in the ways I do now. I think we are on the right path to having an aggression free (or at least a solid aggression diminished) ferret. This kind of thing doesn't happen overnight, and ferrets aren't always easy to train. I believe there are too many ferret owners who bought one thinking that it would happen overnight, and this kind of thinking is what lead to ferrets like Meeka being in this kind of situation in the first place. You can't predict how long it's going to take an animal to change their ways (if ever, in the case of some abused animals), but it makes me feel better just to know I've made some progress.

And maybe, someday, some poor victim of toe terrorism will stumble upon this blog and it could help them out, just a little.

Bitter spray!

Wanted to do a quick post before I forget this:
So we just figured out how to get her to respond to the Bitter Spray. When we were first using it, she was biting right through it like it didn't bother her at all, so we had really stopped using it at all. Tonight, however, she started biting the gloves, hard (which she would normally be doing to our hands if we weren't wearing the gloves), so we doused the gloves in the bitter spray, and just let her bite it like crazy until she realized how horrible it was. Then she stopped. So, it turns out that maybe her tastebuds just aren't as sensitive as other ferrets I've used this on, and she just needs more of it to respond. This might be a big breakthrough in using the bitter spray as a negative reinforcer, we'll see.

Bath day: how did we do it?, immediacy, the ferret mansion, and the human skinner box

After re-reading my last post I thought I should take the time and explain my methods in getting through bath day with no bites. My trick was mostly gloves and treats. I wore the gloves the whole time, even though she didn't bite them once, and she got a treat after every step of the process: one half way through the nail clipping, one at the end of the nail clipping, and one at the end of the bath. As I have said before, everyone likes a good old fashioned bribe. I can't tell you how happy I am that this went so well; a month ago this wouldn't have been possible.

I have noticed that the cage is becoming less and less of a punishment. It works if she has just recently been let out for playtime, but if she has been out for a while and is kind of tired anyway, she fusses for about 30 seconds and then goes to sleep. I guess its like that case of trying to reward a dog with a treat if it isn't hungry; it's meaningless. So I've decided that if shes been out for a while and she bites, I'll try to reinforcement of not letting her go for quite a while. If she remains calm and doesn't bite again, I'll let her down and give her a treat.
She basically lives in a ferret mansion. I probably wouldn't consider it a punishment either to be banished to my comfy hammock with my toys and food:

(The Ferret Mansion)

(Meeka being "punished". Life is hard.)

She is rarely biting now when we pick her up, and when she does she isn't biting hard, just a kind of warning. Usually, we can tell when shes going to bite because she gives of that "get your filthy hands off me" look, which I don't have a picture of because its surprisingly hard to get.

The more recent problem of biting, however, is the sneak attack (see post about toe terrorism). The one were she darts out from random places, bites hard, and then hides again. Sometimes she even tries to take the appendage with her. This is a little more difficult, for several reasons:

• She isn't doing this out of fear, I think shes doing this because I may have inadvertently reinforced the behavior. When shes in a playful mood, she chases my feet and after getting bitten and knowing that pain a few times, I cringe back or run away. This only encourages her more to think its a game, and thats my fault.
• She think it's fun and therefor the behavior in itself is  reinforcement
• Do you realize how hard it is to provide and immediate and consistent reinforcement for a ferret?! There are a million little places in my apartment where she  can hide and I can't get her, and I'm pretty sure she knows every one of them. If I don't get her right away, she runs to a hidey hole, finds a toy, and within 30 seconds she has forgotten all about the previous indiscretion. Tricky!

So I think my best plan is just to try hard to immediately provide a reinforcer, because really, I don't have another option.

Oh, and shes also learned another neat little trick (that I must've inadvertently reinforced through once of my initial bite reactions). I tried to give her a treat the other day and she sniffed it, and then she bit my hand. As soon as I withdrew my hand, she came out a sniffed the ground where the treat should have fallen. I must've dropped it once when she bit me, and she noticed. Thats right folks, she is trying to turn me into a human Skinner Box. Sneaky monkey..........

Thats it for this week!

Bath day!

Quick update:
We survived bath day (AND A NAIL CLIPPING!!!!) without a single bite!!! Woohoo!

Recap, Gloves and more....

Recap

I know it's been a few weeks, but among midterms and other work I've been pretty busy, and I also wanted to wait until I actually had something to report. I'm going to start off by recapping the behavioral shaping techniques because I've changed my mind here and there about how to approach the situation according to how I've seen Meeka responding to me. I've settled on using a combination of negative and positive reinforcers. The outline is as follows:

• Using the cage as a time out: As I mentioned before, this worked that time she was picking on Marley, and this is something I know she really hates, and it's humane.She still gets plenty of play time outside of her cage, and her time outs only last for around ten minutes. If I pick her up and she bites me, I put her in the cage immediately (if possible, it's like there are a million places in a house a ferret can run and hide if she doesn't want to be found). Unfortunately, unwanted cage time coincides with another behavior problem: when shes locked up and doesn't want to be she makes as much noise as possible and rips her cage apart. It's like a five year old throwing a tantrum.This is my fault, because I inadvertently reinforced this behavior the first time she did it by letting her out to keep her quiet. Trust me, I've learned my lesson. So, I put her in there until she quiets down, and then I let her out again, in the hopes that this will positively effect both behaviors. 

• I combine the above behavior with some immediate scruffing.I've been told that this is how a ferret mom does it, and usually it subdues her pretty fast. Occasionally, if shes really angry she keeps biting right through it, but usually she just starts yawning and goes completely limp.

• Treats! Everybody likes a good old fashioned bribe, right? I'll pick her up and if she doesn't bite, she gets a treat.I'll sometimes get her to come over to me and take the treat out of my hand, in the hoped that she associates being near me with a treat. I try to use this the most, but some days the desired behavior is hard to come by. Pretty straightforward positive reinforcement, and at first it was really all I was using, but I found it wasn't enough. Combined with the negative reinforcement though, she seems to be getting the hint. 

• When she bites me, I don't immediately let her down. I know this seems pretty simple, but do you really know how hard it is to ignore your reaction to something that just bit you until to bleed and will probably do it again if you don't let it down? It's hard. very hard. It seems like nothing, but I'm hoping she views it as a negative reinforcer, because her goal when she bites me is to be let go.

Gloves/ Conditioning

After reading numerous websites, articles, blogs and books on ferret training, I feel the need to defend my use of gloves in my training. So here is my defense/rant:

A lot of people seem to think  that gloves are dehumanizing, that there is something necessary about the ferret feeling the warmth and skin of a human hand.. I shouldn't say "a lot" of people, but its probably about 50/50 pro-gloves to no gloves. After listening to the "no glove" people for the first few days (I still have scars), I'm firmly pro-glove.

It really comes down to one thing: conditioning. As much as I'm trying to condition Meeka to stop biting people, shes trying to condition me to leave her alone by biting me.  As I mentioned earlier, it's very, very hard not to have a reaction to being bitten, and all the reactions to being bitten (shying away, letting her down to play, yelling, some kind of physical punishments-which is the sort of thing that caused her to behave like this in a previous abusive home) are not providing the type of training environment that I think will be successful to achieving the behavior I'm trying to shape her towards. I also know it would make me want to handle her less if I knew I was always going to experience pain when I do it, so, this is my way of blocking her conditioning efforts.Call it dehumanizing, but the way I see it, it's better than the alternative.

(I'm well aware they look like creepy serial killer gloves)

Progress

Meeka has good days and bad. At the risk of giving her human qualities, it's almost like mood swings. Some days shes great, almost cuddly (key word being almost, we're not quite there yet), and other days shes a force to be reckoned with who bites everything in her path. For the most part shes stopped biting very hard, which makes me think that she's making some progress but it's going to be very slow. There are times now when she just kind of outs her teeth on my hand but doesn't bite down like "I'm gonna do it, be careful". She seems like shes biting now as a warning and not to injure out of fear. Sometimes she just bites when she wants to play. She has mostly also stopped biting after you pick her up, she just kind of goes still.

Also she has become a pretty serious toe terrorist. She runs out of nowhere, bites a toe, and then runs back. Half the time I don't even know shes in the room, she comes out of nowhere. I think it's her way of trying to play (its kind of how she plays with Marley sometimes), but I still treat it like a normal "pick-up" bite to show that it's unacceptable.

(Latest victim of toe terrorism)

In other news, shes surprising well litter trained, and she gets along great with Marley. Also, noticed earlier that she has started a science project by combining a bottle of Tums and a bottle of water in my dresser drawer. The combination looked lovely after she decided to roll in it,and then all over my clothes. :)

Until next time, heres a picture of Meeka and Marley being all cute in a ferret pile, when they aren't ripping my house (and toes) apart:

Progress?

Progress is slow, but I think it's happening. Meeka has went through a few changes in the last week, some bad, some good.

I think the time I spent kind of ignoring her and just letting her do her thing was helpful. She doesn't jump every time theres a noise now, and she doesn't freak out when the screen saver changes on my computer anymore. This is a big change from the first week we got her. Grant tried to play with her by throwing her a blanket (which Marley and every other ferret I've ever had LOVES) and she let out this weird scream like I had never heard come out of a ferret. It shouldn't be funny, but after I got over the initial shock of hearing that noise I couldn't stop laughing. She actually seeks us out to play with us now, which is a step forward. This said, she is still pretty skittish (she frequently runs around the house with bottle brush tail for no apparent reason), which is something I'm not sure if she'll ever overcome.

She also spent a few days doing this weird dominance thing over Marley. If Meeka was in her cage and wanted out for playtime, she would scruff Marley and try to drag her around. Now Marley didn't look like she was in pain (she just yawned a lot like she was so over it), but it made me nervous. I think Meeka finally stopped doing it when she realized that it resulted in Marley getting out for playtime and her staying in the cage. It only lasted a few days.

She has effectively made a nest in my couch with discarded, crumpled up essay papers, and she has several hidey holes where she stashes all my stuff (which she believes is rightfully hers), so I think shes made herself at home and it's time to move onto the next step of applying some reinforcements.

Her biting has definitely calmed down now that shes used to us, to the point where sometimes she'll let me pick her up without the gloves sometimes, and not bite me. She also does this mild have bite sometimes where she doesn't actually bite, she just puts her teeth down on me, which I think  is her way of warning me. I could live with that.

Shes really at risk to bite when she thinks shes playing, when she doesn't want to go back in her cage, when she is startled, or when she doesn't want to be picked up. So my plan of attack is this: let her out for good long playtimes until she tires herself out and to not startle her. I going to try handling her the most when shes wiped out from playing and doesn't have the energy to fight me. Depending on how I feel about her mood, I may still wear the gloves, or I may not. When she bites I'm going to use the same reinforcer I did when she was bullying Marley: Jail time. She seems to effectively associate it with something she isn't supposed to do, and it's the least mean of all the negative reinforcers, so I'm going to go with it. As a positive reinforcer, I'm going to hand feed her treats as much as I can, to associate myself with a treat.

Sorry there are no pictures this week, I'll post some later on in the week when my phone decides it wants to send my picture messages again.

Diagnosis and Treatment

I think my diagnosis here is pretty self explanatory, considering her history. The main factor contributing to her behavior is her learned history,  Under the observation that she does not bite her previous owner or other ferrets,  and only bites strangers (me), I believe she is biting out of fear due to punishment or trauma because of her history of abuse. Because she only bites when I pick her up and doesn't seek me out and attack me, I also believe she is biting me to escape a situation which she sees as demanding, a situation that causes her anxiety and which she feels the need to escape.

Luckily, we can use behavior therapy to change this behavior. As i mentioned earlier, unfortunately I made the mistake of initially flooding her, using myself as the fear provoking stimuli. I thought it was possible that she would habituate to my contact and deem it non-threatening, and start ignoring it. My goal was also to show her that the behavior would not be rewarded (that if I picked her up and she bit me, I was not going to just let her down and reward her by letting her go free for playtime). Instead, the fear was so strong that she didn't become habituated to me and became sensitized to me, the fear provoking stimuli. As the day went on, she would bite me harder, and through more obstacles, by the end she was biting right through bitter spray on my hands and through scruffing.

So obviously, that didn't work. I'm really hoping that my attempt at sensitization didn't cause any trauma against me, and in the time that has passed it doesn't seem like it has. So I'm going to try a new approach now: habituation through shaping. I'm going to use very small steps until the point where she deems me non-threatening, and yes, I expect this to take a long time. I am going to avoid punishment or negative reinforcers for as long as possible, because they're results are usually short lived. If it comes to the point where I believe she is used to us and is still biting, I will rediagnose the behavior from there.

So as of now, shes almost been here for a week. I've avoided handling her when it's unnecessary, and when I do handle her I sometimes wear gloves. I also try to avoid sneaking up on her or surprising her in any way. I let her out of her cage for a lot of playtime, and I try to keep myself in the same room shes in so she can get used to my presence. I also have sometimes tried to position myself in narrow places (like hallways), where she has to be near me to get by. My goal here is to just get her used to her new home, and to get her accustomed to our movements, sounds, smells, etc.

I'll be updating this blog every Sunday, starting tomorrow,  with my progress. .

Day One

Meet Meeka! She is the lovely ferret you see here. She's an eight month old Silver Shetland who was bred here in Nova Scotia, by private breeders, and myself and my boyfriend, Grant adopted her three days ago. She's a very lovable girl who unfortunately has a serious behavior problem, and in this blog I'm going to chronicle our journey as we tackle this problem,

First of all, I'll give you some of her sad history, As I said, she was born to an extremely irresponsible private breeder here in Nova Scotia, who sold her without spaying, descenting or getting her needles. She was sold to someone who had no experience with ferrets and there she was abused very badly. I'm not entirely sure what the nature of the abuse was, but I know at the least she had been badly neglected. I bought her from a very nice lady in Halifax, Ms.A, who rescued her from that home. When she rescued her (and  I believe another four ferrets who were living there) she was very, very thin and had lost all her fur on the back end of her body. Needless to say, she was in very bad shape. And this was all by the time she was two months old. 

Ms.A got her all the proper operations and needles and spent a lot of time nursing her back to health. Meeka was very scarred of people, and was constantly biting (hard). Ms.A told me it was roughly another two months before she could gain her trust and Meeka stopped biting her. By then time she brought her to me, Meeka was so attached to her she was sleeping in her bed at night. She was great with the immediate family who lived in the house and their other pets, but she was still very aggressive towards strangers. Ms.A had to part with her because one of her kids developed a very bad allergy to ferrets, and thats how she came to me.

Her behavior problem is biting, and HARD! like, drawing blood hard. Before even formally diagnosing the problem, I made the mistake of going with my gut reaction and trying to habituate her to us. It resulted in my had looking like this, except bloodier:

This was a really stupid idea which may have unfortunately traumatized her even worse. I regret that, for many reasons, one being my mangled hand. 

I should note that her aggression problem is only directed towards humans, We have another ferret, a four year old girl named Marley (pictured below), which she gets along great with. They play constantly, and Meeka doesn't bite her any harder than ferrets normally do. This observation will lead to my diagnoses, which I feel is pretty obvious, but I will lay out for you in my next post.

(The cuteness that is Marley)

(Me, 15-20 years)