CLEVER HANS LECTURE 

TITLE: ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTS WITH REASONS TO BEHAVE

Rick Hester

Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S.

A challenge in zoos is engineering environments that support active animals. Current approaches largely focus on the activity with little attention to the outcomes those activities produce. As a result, animals often engage for short periods of time and with little diversity in what they do. What is missing in this approach is an answer to the question, why? Why should an elephant do X? Or a penguin do Y? Outcomes are the purpose of behaviour. The problem we are solving could reasonably be said to be boredom, when boredom is understood as a lack of reinforcers in the environment. When we focus our attention on programming the outcomes of behaviour (reinforcers) in addition to the behaviour itself, more diverse behaviour emerges, and we generate lasting engagement. This presentation discusses our recent efforts to engineer zoo environments rich with reinforcers and the framework that has developed to guide future programs.

About Rick Hester:

Rick Hester is the Curator of Behavioral Husbandry for the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado. He oversees all the zoo's behavior programming. His work includes the zoo's animal training for husbandry, medical, and public show behaviors, environmental enrichment, developing programs to improve problem behavior situations, the zoo's formal animal welfare assessments, and exhibit design for behavior goals. He has worked at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo since 2006. He spent 10 years working as an animal keeper caring for a wide variety of species, including small primates, great apes, penguins, African lions, and bears. In 2015, he started working with Dr. Susan Friedman and began to understand the importance of behavior analysis and its application for animals in human care. He has curated the zoo’s behavior programs since 2018, is affiliative faculty at Colorado State University in the Department of Biology and a consultant and course co-instructor for Susan Friedman's Behavior Works LLC.