Final Thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed training Lil Sebastian. I thought it was entertaining to use the operant boxes and see Lil Sebastian's progress due to my own input.  Probably my favorite thing was shaping Lil Sebastian and seeing her become attached to me.  At the beginning of the process she was very jumpy and skittish with me.  But by mid training, she was much more calm when I picked her up and would even take food out of my hands which I thought was cool.

I think the current process of how to operant train is pretty good, especially as a instructional tool prior to our own project which we will be starting in a couple weeks. I will probably continue to work with Lil Sebastian for my second project if my partner doesn't take her first.

The most surprising thing for me was how easy shaping was.  I may of been pessimistic about the whole process and probably doubted myself a little too much, but I thought that the shaping process was going to be much more difficult than it was. I was surprised to see how quickly a little rat could catch on to some things.

On that note, I definitely overcame a misconception that rats aren't very intelligent, but actually they are pretty smart. Knowing what some other people have done in the past with their rat is impressive that a rodent can pick up on such outlandish behaviors such as painting or dunking a marble through a hoop.

I look forward to continuing to work with Lil Sebastian, or to train a new rat for my second project!