E1b2 Habits & Practice in Action

I'd like to introduce you to two guinea
pigs. This is Mortimer and this is

Sebastian and I'd like to talk about
them in relationship to habits and

practices. And you know if you have
pets or if you take care of farm animals

that there are certain habits that you
perform every single day and that

would include, in the case of guinea pigs,
making sure the continually have water.

Making sure they have food and that not
only would include pellets but also fresh

greens because just like humans they
can't make their own vitamin C so they

need to have a source of that. And other
types of habits would be cleaning their

containers and checking them occasionally
to make sure that they are healthy.

That their teeth aren't over growing.
They're rodents, their teeth keep

growing, they need to gnaw on things.
And also make sure they don't have any

abscesses on their feet. So there's
regular habits, but there's also

practice. In the case of these two guinea
pigs, the practice has been related to

trying to get them to calm down and be
okay with humans and particularly me.

And the reason for that is that both of
these had been adopted from pet stores

and then returned to the stores by their
owners but separately. And I had

Sebastian first, and Sebastian's personality
is quite outgoing. You could hear that

purring. And so I had- it was pretty easy
to get Sebastian on my side, it really

involved food and just not moving too
abruptly. But he had problems, he was

losing his fur pretty excessively and so
I ran across Mortimer who had also been

returned to a different pet store. You
usually don't put two adult males together

but Sebastian just didn't seem to be
thriving and Mortimer was in bad shape

too in that he was not being adopted
because he was very unfriendly, a

little bit nippy. Guinea pigs don't
typically bite, the wind just picked up

so that scared Sebastian. You're okay.
Alright Mortimer you go. So nobody

was adopting Mortimer. You're doing
really well there. Nothing like a guinea

pig. I know that wind scared you didn't
it? Getting Mortimer to even be pet

took months. Luckily he really likes
Sebastian so when I pet Sebastian it

calms Mortimer down so that he would
learn to tolerate it and now he actually

enjoys it and it calms him down but it
took a lot of different trials and techniques

to get this to work. That's the practice.
And if you're a pet owner, it's the same

thing. If you don't want you cat to
rip up your sofa, if you don't want

your dog to piddle in the corner of
the room, yeah you're gonna need to

practice different techniques to see
what works. What is a humane way

to make sure that we can live with our
animals?