The topic today in my General Psychology was operant conditioning, which reminded me of a wonderful thing I discovered a while back -- rat basketball.
Yes, you can train a rat to play basketball, much like you can train a dog to play basketball (remember
Air Bud?). It all has to do with operant conditioning, sometimes known as shaping or conditioning. It's exactly like clicker training in dogs, in that you reward a specific action and build upon that action. A very nice article about clicker training in small mammals can be found
here.
The COSI Science Center in Columbus, Ohio features
daily rat basketball games. You can watch a miniature clip of the rats playing basketball and get a detailed description of how they were trained
here. (There used to be another video about rat basketball floating around the web but all the links I find seem to be broken -- if anyone can direct me to this I would surely appreciate it!)
At Nebraska Wesleyan University, students in the Basic Learning Principles class learn about operant conditioning first hand by training rats to perform stunts in preparation for the
Xtreme Rat Challenge (originally known as the Rat Olympics until a trademark dispute) at the end of the semester. The events the rats must participate in are jumping hurdles, climbing a vertical rope, walking a tightrope, lifting weights, and a long jump. At the university website you can view a
detailed journal of the process of training the rats. A photographic journal of the 2002 event can be seen
here, and photos and video of the 2005 event can be seen
here.
This site also has videos, although the images seem to be broken.
On a somewhat unrelated note, my scouring of the web for information caused me to stumble upon
Rat Olympics, a very cute and entertaining web game.
Pet rat owners are getting into the game as well with a fairly new sport known as rat agility. Rat agility is much like dog agility, only miniaturized and a bit more relaxed. There are a number of wonderful websites out there that include rules and training tips as well as instructions on making obstacles.
The Agile Rat Tips for Agility TrainingRat Health Care Information: Agility and Obedience Eva's Rat Agility Page
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posted by Sophielynette @ 5:23 PM