This badge signifies completion of the course Ascending Towards Assent in Husbandry presented by Ryan Talbot.

Training for husbandry procedures is a fundamental responsibility for caretakers of animals in human care. As we move towards more compassionate care for our learners, we not only strive to offer them choice and control over when, how, and what they are being trained to do, and by whom, but also seek to do so with their genuine assent (Linnehan et al, 2023). This presentation documents an ongoing journey to provide learners with more control over their husbandry training, highlights useful general practices, and suggests ways in which we can increase degrees of freedom in applied settings. We will also showcase some inexpensive and relatively easy-to-build tools that can facilitate communication for canine and caprine learners during husbandry procedures, and might be easily adapted to other species with similar morphology.

This course takes approximately 2 hours to complete.