Things I learned this week:

  • Nutmeg loves food and will do anything for treats
  • Training everyday is great exercise for her
  • She learned much faster than I expected
  • Trust and comfort levels are very important factors in her performance
  • Short training times work best! Nutmeg does best practicing her trick for short periods of time around 5-10 minutes at once
  • She also does best with time to adventure during training time since she gets easily distracted
  • I only taught her to do the trick on my hand but by accident I learned she understands the concept well enough that she will perform it on another object. For example, she climbed up on one of her toys for me yesterday in the same way she climbs up on my hand
  • When I lifted my hand off the ground for her to stand on, I wasn’t expecting how hard it would be to keep my hand still for her. It took me some practice to hold my hand steady enough that she was comfortable leaning on it

I think this first trick was a success! I had so much fun teaching Nutmeg to climb up on my hand, we had some nice bonding time during our practice. She learned faster than I expected and was very eager to ‘perform’ her trick every time I brought her out for practice. I was also happy to learn that even though I was the only one training her, she happily performs the trick for other individuals as well.

Nutmeg’s First Trick

Reflecting on the process of teaching her a trick, I decided to develop a system for rating how well the process went. At the end of teaching her a new trick (every 2 weeks), I will post a little rating on;

A.) how Nutmeg did with the training and

B.) how well Nutmeg mastered the trick

For each of those two categories, the rating will be out of five ‘carrots’. Below is an explanation of the carrot rating system for each category.
A.) How Nutmeg did with the training:

1 carrot = “I had no interest”

2 carrots = “I tried, but it’s not my week”

3 carrots = “Give me lots of treats and I’ll consider it”

4 carrots = “I like this, let’s keep it going”

5 carrots = “Yes, this is awesome I did great!”

B.) How well Nutmeg mastered the trick:

1 carrot = “Nope, it’s not happening”

2 carrots = “I had my moments, but I don’t think I’m a fan of this one”

3 carrots = “Sometimes I’ll do it but only when I feel like it”

4 carrots = “I’m pretty good at this”

5 carrots = “I am amazing at this! Smartest Guinea Pig ever!”

Paws Up Rating:

Come back next week to learn about my next trick ‘spin’!