Rat Training Experience
On this page you will find blurbs written by various rat trainers. These will discuss difficulties that each person faced along with personal strategies and successes. If you would like to submit a blurb, feel free to send it to me via my contact page and I'll be sure to include it (along with any credits) on this page!
Overall, I've found training rats to be a fun and rewarding experience. There were definitely some difficulties when I first got started, namely figuring out how to keep my rat's attention and figuring out how to raise criteria without causing the rat to get frustrated and give up. But with each trick I trained I got better as a trainer, and found what worked for me and my rats. I've now trained 6 different rats to do everything from spin to play basketball and if there's one thing you take away from this message, it should be that being flexible and having patience are going to be your biggest helpers when training your rats. - Good luck and happy training, Esther |
I had some 22 rats in the past. Males and females. As for training rats, I have only extensively trained one rat so far, my buck Snoopy. Snoopy is trained using a clicker, (some) verbal instructions in Dutch, and Positive Reinforcement Training. I have trained him during our dinners together on the couch. He is eager to learn and I am training him since late 2016, more extensively since February 2017. When I got him he was already hand-reared and he started coming to me and hopped on my knee for a treat when I came out of the bedroom after sleeping. Some of the tricks he understood and performed within 10 attempts and for some tricks he actually trained me. So far I have mainly used lure-training, but that doesn't seem to work out that well with his 'walking upright' training. I have started looking in to shape-training. Snoopy is used to getting multiple bitesize portions, like a dab of mashed potato as a single reward, so I will have to change that now for the shape-training. Sometimes training can be frustrating because the rat doesn't understand what you want from it or when they just don't feel like making the effort. And then the rat just walks around the training object to get his treat. Training rats has made me connect a lot more with them and I love the interaction. - Happy training! Bart from the uitjebolsmurf YouTube |
Disclosure: Esther (and her site rattrix.weebly.com) is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com