Shaping Jubilee!

The goal was now to shape Jubilee further to press the bar in order to receive food

DAY 2
Today I trained for 28:43 and she slowly started to catch on. In the time period she pressed the level 5 times while I rewarded her 75 times. Jubilee frequently put her paws on the level but did not push down hard enough to trigger a reward. She would put her paws up on the bar and just stand there looking for a reward, so I eventually had to stop rewarding the behavior of just putting her paws on it and force her to become a little frustrated and express more behavior. She eventually started pushing harder but not enough to associate it with the reward. These actions of putting her paws on the lever or going to that area and then looking for food in the hopper proved to me that she was magazine trained and her behavior was being shaped.

DAY 3
I continued with training Jubilee on the FR 1 schedule. I trained for about 27 minutes and I administered 58 rewards while she pressed the bar 14 times on her own. She has quite an unconventional way of pressing the lever though, the likes to shove her nose to the back and push with her whole head and face. She will do this every time she goes to push the bar instead of finding a way to push with her paws. Sometimes she will try to chew and nibble on the bar before she pushes it, but eventually she will stick her nose and face on the bar and push it down to get food. Hopefully she is not going to become conditioned to a behavior chain where she nibbles and then push it down. If this does occur I will have to find a way to extinct this behavior.