Joined
·
503 Posts
This is going to sound weird... but how do you know when a rat is actually paying attention to you? I'm (attempting) to do trick training... but I'm kind of confused as to what signals I should be looking for to indicate that his attention is on me. I've trained other animals before, but it's always been dogs or cats - they have big, expressive eyes (most importantly with pupils) and ears so I could always tell when they were paying attention or not.
With my rats, it seems different. They never seem to look at me, but they're always listening, I feel. They rotate their ears and their ears are always on me, even if their eyes aren't. I've kind of found it similar to horses, though with horses the reason that I couldn't get visual attention is, clearly, that I was on their back
When doing ground work I knew they could see me, because of how their eyes are set.
With rats... mine always seem aloof. It might be because they're boys, it might be because I haven't been working with them long, but they always seem to be doing their own thing and they do what I ask of them as more of a side note.
Long story short, my boy will perform the tricks (or at least, follow my hand for now
) that I'm asking of him... but he never seems focused to me. I'm wondering if it's just because I don't know what a focused rat looks like. I know rats fall into a weird grey area of predator and prey... so perhaps I'm just expecting them to act too much like one or the other in terms of how they "answer" me.
(any super long deep behavioral analysis will be much loved and appreciated
I love that kind of stuff)
With my rats, it seems different. They never seem to look at me, but they're always listening, I feel. They rotate their ears and their ears are always on me, even if their eyes aren't. I've kind of found it similar to horses, though with horses the reason that I couldn't get visual attention is, clearly, that I was on their back
With rats... mine always seem aloof. It might be because they're boys, it might be because I haven't been working with them long, but they always seem to be doing their own thing and they do what I ask of them as more of a side note.
Long story short, my boy will perform the tricks (or at least, follow my hand for now
(any super long deep behavioral analysis will be much loved and appreciated