Session #3006

Abstract

The topic of maximizing behavior welfare for the avian patient has been explored with increased interest in recent years. As the conversation continues, more information sharing amongst scientific disciplines has resulted in further advances that facilitate maximizing benefits and minimizing harms for animals requiring medical attention. Practitioners can build upon the foundation of information that has proven useful and incorporate additional evidence-based findings to better overcome difficult challenges. This presentation reviews behavior science and practical application that remains effective, efficient, and optimal, as well as introduce emerging practices that are improving welfare with alternative approaches for addressing distress.

Introduction

Contemporary avian veterinary practitioners have been migrating away from traditional practices that can potentially evoke distress, such as handling and restraint upon initial intake. Depending on the condition of the patient, strategies can include a wide range of options including combinations of the following.¹

• Observe first without handling or restraint
• Give the patient time to habituate to the exam room
• Associate appetitives (such as food, touch, toys) with procedures
• Moving slowly around the patient
• Carefully introducing novel stimuli
• Conducting procedures in small increments of time and providing “breaks”
• Arranging the environment so that capture for restraint is easily accomplished (thus minimizing distress)
• Arranging the environment so that the patient can emit desired responses voluntarily (such as stand on a scale or enter a transport container)
• Learn and respond to body language to increase patient’s comfort
• Utilize conscious sedation
• Train desired responses using reinforcement in the clinic
• Teach clients to train desired responses using reinforcement prior to coming to the clinic
• Provide clients with instructions prior to arriving at the clinic to facilitate avian examinations

While these practices have improved animal welfare, it is advantageous to continue to explore emerging information to fine-tune the understanding of behavior science and its application to strive for optimal welfare for avian patients. After a brief review of how animals learn, the following sections will focus on discussions that have been leading to important advances.

How Animals Learn

Animal behavior draws upon several scientific disciplines. Some of these include ethology, phylogeny, and ontogeny. Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, especially as it occurs in a natural environment.² Phylogeny is the natural selection of traits due to genetic inheritance over generations.^3,4 Practitioners are better able to predict some potential behavioral responses based on knowledge of ethology and phylogeny of the patient; however, ontogeny often can supersede all. Ontogeny is the selection of behavior by consequences during the lifetime of the individual organism.^3,4 An individual’s learning history over its lifetime has the potential to tremendously alter responses.

There are some basic principles or laws of nature that demonstrate an organism responds to changes in the environment in systematic ways. Understanding these provides a foundation upon which all animal behavior change is accomplished.

The first of these is that behavior is selected by the environment.^3,4 Behavior is often misunderstood to be a phenomenon that comes from a drive or motivation within the animal; however, the behaviorist approach is like that of evolution. Environmental conditions select behavior. This then leads to the relationship between the behavior and the resulting consequences, which can be described as a contingency.⁵

A contingency is the relationship between two events, one being contingent or a consequence of the other event. Consequences can occur on a variety of schedules from continuous to almost none and still maintain behavior. The range in between is referred to as intermittent.³ It is also important to remember that contingencies occur under specific conditions.⁵ This is how behavior change is produced. Behavior is what the organism is doing. Overt behavior is observable and measurable. There is also covert behavior, such as thoughts and emotions.^4,6

Consequences are the outcome for doing the behavior.^3-5 This can increase or decrease the future probability of a behavior being emitted. Some possible consequences of behavior include the following.⁷

• Escape/avoidance
• Tangible items (e.g., food, enrichment)
• Attention/social affiliations
• Sensory or automatically reinforcing experiences (such as self-stimulatory behaviors)
• Preferred activities

Reinforcement is a learning process in which consequences serve to increase the future probability of a behavior being emitted under certain conditions. Punishment is a learning process in which consequences serve to decrease the future probability of behavior being emitted under certain conditions.^3,4

These basic underpinnings of animal learning and behavior have served to provide a foundation upon which interventions that maximize benefits and minimize harms are built. Understandably, this section serves only as a brief introduction to how animals learn. Explaining the science of behavior change is beyond the scope of this discussion. It is recommended practitioners review the references for additional materials to continue their journey.

Emerging Advances

Using Functional Reinforcers

Functional reinforcers are the reinforcers already existing in the environment that have been identified via assessment as maintaining the behavior.⁵ It can be particularly helpful to look for the functional reinforcer when evaluating undesired behavior and the consequence that maintains it. For example, an animal that lunges or moves away when a veterinary professional approaches may want distance as a reinforcer. This is information that can be used to develop an appropriate behavior intervention plan.

Using the functional reinforcer results in the animal getting the outcome it desires. It also avoids delays to appropriate interventions in the case of problem behavior. This can also potentially help address continued reinforcement and rehearsal of undesired responses.

Animal caregivers and practitioners often overlook that animals emit behaviors (such as aggressive responses, escape, and avoidance) to gain distance as a reinforcer from an aversive stimulus. This stimulus could be a person, object, place, sound, or other stimulus. When this is observed, it is an indicator that a negative reinforcement contingency is likely maintaining the behavioral response.

Negative Reinforcement

Rosales-Ruiz pointed out that fear responses and aggressive behaviors have generally been regarded as respondent behaviors.⁸ Traditionally, practitioners have been advised to use only respondent conditioning techniques, such as desensitization or counterconditioning. The focus of these procedures is on changing the animal’s emotional state towards the aversive stimulus; however, these can many times be difficult to successfully apply in veterinary settings with animals presenting such extreme responses that no appetitive will overcome the strength of the aversive stimulus. Often no significant changes in behavior are observed, or the response is that of an obviously uncomfortable animal attempting to collect the desired item while forced to tolerate the presence of the aversive stimulus. This might be described as the animal behaving as if conflicted. Additionally, the respondent behavior may have occurred in the initial interactions with the stimulus. Subsequent responses are likely operant in which behaviors emitted by the animal in the presence of the stimulus result in desired outcomes, such as increased distance as described previously.⁹

Other common procedures to address fear responses and aggressive behavior include trying to directly shape a calm response using food or other appetitives. Again, if the animal is unreceptive to appetitives, there is often little option for success unless the practitioner is willing to consider deprivation tactics that may have the potential to compromise animal welfare. In such an example, this has the potential to make positive reinforcement coercive if the animal has only one way to access the appetitive.

As has been discussed, another option is to recognize that fear responses and aggressive behaviors can be seen as successful behaviors that are maintained by negative reinforcement. Engaging in these behaviors leads to giving the animal a desired outcome, increased distance from the aversive stimulus. For example, a parrot learns that when it lunges, hands will go away and leave the bird alone.⁸ This view offers an alternative approach to addressing these problem behaviors. When applied properly, distance can be used as a reinforcer to shape calm behaviors that replace fear responses or aggressive behaviors. Using this approach has the potential to expose the animal to a much less potent aversive stimulus than using counter conditioning, in which the pressure for the animal to tolerate the presence of the aversive stimulus may be greater.

Practitioners (and caregivers) have been led to believe negative reinforcement is to be avoided at all costs; however, this requires further clarification. Negative reinforcement is a learning principle. How it is applied in a procedure can look vastly different. Often in the veterinary environment, the aversive stimulus is already present. It is not introduced or contrived to coerce behavior. This distinction is important. This changes the objective to creating conditions in which the aversive stimulus can be far enough away the animal can emit desired responses that can be reinforced by the removal of the aversive stimulus. This benign application of negative reinforcement is giving the animal the outcome it desires under conditions in which it can be successful. Applied in this manner, the procedure can be used to introduce novel people, medical instruments, and to teach birds laying calmly in a towel will result in looser restraint. See the reference list for additional resources with details on practical application.^10-13

Emotions as Contingency Descriptors

Emotions have often been removed from discussions of animal behavior due to their inaccessibility. They have been described as internal, mentalistic, indescribable, requiring verbal communication, and anthropomorphic; however, an alternative approach is to consider emotions as covert and emotional behavior as overt. Emotions may not be observable, but emotional behavior is observable and can include physical movements, vocalizations, feather positions, or changes in eye position, among others, that the bird emits in response to the environment. Emotional behavior can alert practitioners to aversive stimuli impacting behavior.

For example, if a bird is leaning away from a towel, giving darting looks, searching for an escape route, and crouching in preparation to fly, this can indicate a negative reinforcement contingency is in place. The emotional behaviors observed can be equated with a fear response, but they also give information about the conditions that are giving rise to this response. This overt behavior gives information about the contingencies that are impacting the animal that result in the emotional behavior. The contingencies can be changed, which results in a change in the emotional behavior.⁶ Therefore, the practitioner can change the contingencies to address the emotional response. In this example, the functional reinforcer is distance from the aversive stimulus. Therefore, one potential option is to start with the towel far enough away that the bird can emit calm responses and then remove the towel. This distance is gradually decreased and the removal process for calm behavior is repeated, until the towel is close and the bird remains calm. Usually at this stage, the bird is calm enough to be receptive to appetitives in the presence of the towel. A shaping procedure with positive reinforcement can then be initiated.

Viewing emotions and emotional behavior as the outcome of contingencies gives practitioners starting points towards addressing distress using systematic interventions that create new desired behavior change. Traditional approaches have focused on stopping the emotion of fear. Building a new repertoire of behavior ultimately teaches the animal how to respond in the presence of the stimulus, which can help change the response to the stimulus from aversive to appetitive.

Nonlinear Contingency Analysis

Nonlinear contingency analysis can help reveal the multiple contingencies that are operating on the same target behavior. This can be viewed as a package of contingencies (which includes the contingency that results from the direct linear analysis). Each of these contingencies involves a cost or benefit. If one of these contingencies involves a critical consequence (something important to the survival of the animal), it can override or suppress the impact of the other contingencies.^5,14 This type of analysis can help reveal when training strategies may be less than optimal. For example, if an animal is hesitant to go into a crate and allow the door to be closed, a strategy that might be considered is to only offer the animal’s diet in the crate. While this may on the surface appear to be a positive reinforcement-based procedure (offering food for moving into the enclosed space), there are also other contingencies to consider. Hesitancy to move into the crate could indicate a negative reinforcement contingency is also maintaining behavior. The animal is moving to avoid or gain distance from the crate. The animal may also emit this response when closing the door is attempted, which would indicate another negative reinforcement contingency. Therefore, for the positive reinforcement procedure to be noncoercive and more effective, it would be beneficial to address the negative reinforcement contingencies first that are maintaining escape and avoidance behaviors.¹⁵ This would remove the high cost involved in approaching and entering the crate and increase the benefit in approaching to access the food, instead of waiting for hunger to override the fear response. A nonlinear contingency analysis is used in programs such as the constructional approach.

For most practitioners and caregivers, it is usually easy to identify positive reinforcement contingencies. This has been promoted and used frequently in contemporary animal training. Positive reinforcement may also have been contrived, meaning the reinforcer selected is often food or some other convenient appetitive; however, as described above, functional reinforcers are those that already are maintaining the behavior and may be the preferred outcome for the animal. And as nonlinear contingency analysis demonstrates, they are not the only factor influencing behavior. The environment can also be impacting the behavior in other ways (e.g., loud places, unstable perching, slippery surfaces). Further investigation can reveal the impact of relevant prior learning history and the natural history of the species (ethology and phylogeny). This can help practitioners gain more understanding as to why a preferred food item may not always be successful in reaching desired behavior goals.

Consider Behavioral Freedom

Behavioral freedom is the possibility of genuine alternative choices that result in equally reinforcing consequences.¹⁶

Using the behavioral freedom model provides a more accurate way of measuring choice rather than using cultural- or colloquial-based assumptions about choice (and control). It also allows the word control to remain aligned with its already understood relationships to behavioral control (e.g., control by contingent consequences, stimulus control).¹⁷ It causes practitioners to ask the important questions of what is the outcome for the animal when it does not participate? If the result is “nothing,” then true choice has not been provided. Often in traditional animal training there is only one option for gaining desired outcomes. This results in zero degrees of freedom. Increasing degrees of freedom gives us information to consider about why our animal does or does not participate in training.

For example, a parrot may be trained to touch the tip of a syringe to access a preferred food item. If that same preferred food item is offered freely nearby and the bird actively avoids the syringe to access the freely available food, this can provide information that distance from the syringe is a desired outcome. This indicates a negative reinforcement contingency exists that must be addressed. By providing one degree of freedom, the practitioner can discover when positive reinforcement is coercive and implement procedures that better address superimposition of contingencies. Superimposition occurs when contingencies are competing. In this example, adding one degree of freedom reveals the negative reinforcement contingency is still maintaining escape and avoidance responses and that positive reinforcement for touching the syringe with zero degrees of freedom was coercive.

Practitioners can regularly evaluate items and experiences provided as consequences to determine if access, availability, and conditions have created critical consequences. Practitioners should regularly evaluate the degrees of freedom tied to each critical consequence to determine the behavioral freedom. The smaller the number of degrees of freedom, the greater the coercion.¹⁶

Genuine choice exists when animals have many equally available opportunities to earn equally potent consequences.¹⁸ This approach helps practitioners understand that coercion cannot be reduced to the oversimplified interpretation of aversive control.¹⁶ It helps illustrate that when there is power over resources (critical consequences) and access to those resources, it is possible to be coercive.

Assent

Assent means to agree with an opinion, approval, or permission. In other words, the participant agrees with what is happening. This agreement can be nonverbal and expressed by one’s actions or conduct.¹⁹ In animal training this means assessing body language and often providing freedom of movement to escape or avoid participation if desired. Assent usually signals stronger agreement than consent, which suggests acquiescence and little more. For example, a human can sign their consent to a procedure but may not agree with it. Practitioners are really looking for assent in animal training, although the word consent is often conflated with assent. Animal caregivers are also monitoring for assent throughout the training process. Assent also requires that animals have multiple ways to access desired outcomes, as described in the behavioral freedom section. Limiting options to only one, especially for critical consequences (such as food), can be coercive.

Assent can also be evaluated by looking for responses such as affiliative behaviors (e.g., soliciting play, allogrooming, allopreening), offering trained behaviors, approaching the practitioner, engaging with the practitioner, and accepting food items or other appetitives. It is desired to see animals showing relaxed and calm responses or what might be described as eager-to-participate type responses.

Assent withdrawal can be evaluated by looking for responses such as escape or avoidance behaviors, apathy/ignoring the practitioner, engaging in other more appetitive activities, fear responses, aggressive behavior, and conflicted responses, among others.

Start Buttons and Assent

A start button is a trained behavior with a great deal of reinforcement history tied to a specific behavior chain. This term has become popularized recently, but the practice is not new. Prior to naming this phenomenon, many caregivers had learned to look for body language that preceded an animal engaging in a desired trained response. The start button strategy teaches people to either look for or train this specific behavior and add it to the chain; however, this can only be true assent if two or more start buttons are available at the same time that result in equally reinforcing consequences.

Resources and Tools

Behavior Intervention Guidelines

Whenever it is determined that a change of behavior is essential, animals deserve the most effective, efficient, and optimal interventions and behavior change plans.⁷ Fortunately, there are resources available to help guide practitioners through this process, whether it is addressing an undesired behavior or working towards a new goal.

Functional behavior assessment is a process used for gathering information used to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of behavioral support.²⁰ It includes providing an operationalized definition of the behavior, identification of events that are functionally related to the behavior, identification of consequences that maintain the behavior, hypothesis about the function of the behavior, and direct observation to confirm/support hypothesis, as well as careful monitoring of interventions once implemented. This gathering of information helps caregivers speculate what might be the reasons behind the behaviors observed.^21,22 Many practitioners may recognize this as the A-B-C or three-term contingency analysis of a target behavior. This is a helpful starting point, especially when trying to determine the functional reinforcer. This can be used in conjunction with nonlinear contingency analysis for further understanding of what maintains a behavior.

The free behavior intervention guidelines at www.BIGforAnimals.com provide step-by-step instructions on how to conduct a functional behavior assessment.⁷

The Constructional Approach to Animal Welfare and Training

Many traditional behavior-change programs focus on reducing or eliminating undesired responses. This can result in undesired outcomes that are occasioned from using extinction and punishment-based procedures. The constructional approach developed by Goldiamond²³ focuses exclusively on building repertoires of behaviors.

The constructional approach is a program that includes five elements for attaining desired behavioral outcomes. The five elements include the following: 1) identify a specific behavior goal, 2) identify existing behaviors (a starting point from which behavior can be built), 3) determine appropriate change procedures based upon 4) the consequences (linear and nonlinear) that maintain the behavior (including functional reinforcers), and 5) implement a means of monitoring progress. This can be as simple as taking video recordings of sessions.⁵

This summary does not do justice to the nuances that differentiate this program from others; however, resources (such as Nonlinear Contingency Analysis,⁵ Constructional Approach to Animal Welfare and Training,²⁴ Exotic Animal Training: The Constructional Approach to Addressing Extreme Fear Responses and Aggressive Behavior,¹³ and various publications provided by the Organization for Reinforcement Contingencies with Animals²⁵) can provide details on application that can lead to improved animal welfare.

Conclusions

Many fields are benefitting from the emerging trends in behavior analysis that are improving animal welfare. This includes a focus on identifying and using functional reinforcers. This has led to recognizing that negative reinforcement has been the maintaining contingency for many behaviors. This in turn has resulted in the development of shaping procedures using negative reinforcement that reinforce calm repertoires of behaviors under conditions in which animals can be successful. Furthermore, it is without question that identifying the many contingencies that are impacting a target behavior is essential to fully understand what maintains behavior. Behavioral freedom provides clarity to the questions of choice, control, and assent. These often-misunderstood topics are far more complex than what procedures were used or whether an animal can opt in or opt out. As practitioners seek to add more structure and systematic approaches to their behavioral interventions, resources (such as BIG for Animals) and the constructional approach can facilitate continued growth towards evidence-based behavioral practices.

References

1.  McLaughlin A, Heidenreich B, Strunk A, Clark P. Fear Free veterinary certification program—avian. https://fearfreepets.com/fear-free-certification-overview-avian. Accessed August 19, 2022.

2.  Fisher W. Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis. New York, NY: Guilford Publications; 2011.

3.  Cooper JO, Heron TE, Heward WL. Applied Behavior Analysis. 3rd ed. London, UK: Pearson Education; 2019.

4.  Pierce WD, Cheney CD. Behavior Analysis and Learning. 4th ed. New York, NY: Psychology Press; 2017.

5.  Layng TVJ, Andronis PT, RTC III, Abdel-Jalil A. Nonlinear Contingency Analysis. London, UK: Taylor & Francis; 2022.

6.  Layng TVJ. Private emotions as contingency descriptors: emotions, emotional behavior, and their evolution. Eur J Behav Anal. 2017;18(2):168–179.

7.  Heidenreich B, Farhoody P, Hetts S, et al. Behavior intervention guidelines for animals. www.BIGforAnimals.com. Accessed August 19, 2022.

8.  Rosales-Ruiz J. From fierce or fearful to friendly: a shaping program for dogs, cats, horses and beyond. www.caawt.com/cat. Accessed August 19, 2022.

9.  Snider K. CAT with Kellie Snider. The animal training fundamentals podcast with Barbara Heidenreich. https://animaltrainingfundamentals.com/podcasts/c-a-t-with-kellie-snider. Accessed August 19, 2022.

10.  Heidenreich B, McLaughlin A. Addressing fear and aggression in avian patients: a constructional approach. https://fearfreepets.com/courses/addressing-fear-aggression-in-avian-patients-a-constructional-approach. Accessed August 19, 2022.

11.  Fernandez EJ. Training petting zoo sheep to act like petting zoo sheep: an empirical evaluation of response-independent schedules and shaping with negative reinforcement. Animals. 2020;10(7):1122.

12.  Katz M, Rosales-Ruiz J. Constructional fear treatment: teaching fearful shelter dogs to approach and interact with a novel person. J Exp Anal Behav. 2022;118(2):278–291.

13.  Heidenreich B. Exotic animal training: the constructional approach to addressing extreme fear responses and aggressive behavior. https://animaltrainingfundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Heidenreich-Constructional-Approach.pdf. Accessed August 19, 2022.

14.  Layng TVJ. The search for an effective clinical behavior analysis: the nonlinear thinking of Israel Goldiamond. Behav Anal. 2009;32(1):163–184.

15.  Layng TVJ. Consequences superimposition, coercion, and their nonlinear alternatives. In: Proceedings from the Animal Behavior Management Alliance; April 5–8, 2022.

16.  de Fernandes RC, Dittrich A. Expanding the behavior-analytic meanings of “freedom”: the contributions of Israel Goldiamond. J Behav Soc Sci. 2018;27:4–19.

17.  Farhoody P. Animal training revisited. Operants. 2021;2–3.

18.  Layng TVJ. Coercion without aversive stimuli. In: Proceedings from The Art and Science of Animal Training; February 22–23, 2020; Hurst, TX.

19.  Heidenreich B. Assent or consent? Which one do you think is most relevant to animal training? https://youtu.be/OBnoRh_9Bl8. Accessed August 19, 2022.

20.  O’Neill R, Horner R, Albin R, et al. Functional Assessment and Programme Development for Problem Behaviour: A Practical Handbook. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing; 1997.

21.  Ingram K, Lewis-Palmer T, Sugai G. Function-based intervention planning: comparing the effectiveness of FBA function-based and non-function-based intervention plans. J Posit Behav Interv. 2005;7(4):224–236.

22.  Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Functional behavioral assessment—Tim Lewis. https://youtu.be/C_AKrr_mCJ8. Accessed August 19, 2022.

23.  Goldiamond I. Toward a constructional approach to social problems: ethical and constitutional issues raised by applied behavior analysis. Behav Soc Sci. 2002;11(2):108–197.

24.  Constructional approach to animal welfare and training. www.caawt.com. Accessed August 19, 2022.

25.  University of North Texas. The organization for reinforcement contingencies with animals. https://orca.unt.edu/publications. Accessed August 19, 2022.