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Not too bad. I did two amusing animal acts each day for the audience, emphasizing safety and good husbandry and all that sort of thing. My audience on Sunday seemed to be mostly younger folks who were more interested in watching the cobras hood than anything else, so I changed the program around a bit to be more of a "wildlife encounters" show.
I enjoyed working with Flavio Morrissiey, Gatorland's curator, doing some behavioral conditioning work with one of my worst mannered mambas in front of an audience. He has had phenomenal success voice training a group of Cuban crocs and a big old porosus, and we worked together doing target training on one of my captive bred greens. This snake takes small food rewards readily and is highly motivated by the sight of food, so he is an ideal candidate for behavioral conditioning.
"Aggressive eater" doesn't even begin to describe this guy. This snake will actually attempt to eat a snake hook. Not bite at it aggressively, I mean really try to eat in a feeding response. A pinky or a fuzzy is a highly motivating reward for him, and since he's a 5' snake he can have a lot of them during a training session.
I have been able to basically control this animal with the sight of food on tongs - he will follow that anywhere, right into the safety bin when it's cage cleaning time. But mambas really can be trained to do specific behaviors in exchange for a food reward, so that's the next step. The Jacksonville Zoo has had a lot of success with training their Western greens to enter a trap box on cue, but I'll be teaching this guy some different tricks using target training.
Handling him is not a big problem, so I'd rather train him to follow a nonfood target on a stick and hold his nose to it for an increasing length of time to recieve his food reward. That has more practical applications in mamba posing for photography. After he's figured out that he has to hold still for a bit in a certain pose to get the food, the next step is rewarding him for opening his mouth and holding that pose for increasing time increments.
I have a young king cobra that is "bowl trained" in the sense that he is always fed from a specific food bowl and will follow it around and put his nose to it even when it contains no food and has been through the dishwasher to remove all scents. He wouldn't perform for our audience this weekend since he was just starting a shed, but he's remarkably reliable at home.
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