{"id":190,"date":"2009-04-14T19:51:30","date_gmt":"2009-04-14T19:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/?p=190"},"modified":"2009-04-14T19:59:01","modified_gmt":"2009-04-14T19:59:01","slug":"antelope-and-elevators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/antelope-and-elevators\/","title":{"rendered":"Antelope and elevators…"},"content":{"rendered":"

We got a call for a project that needed an antelope lifting his head suddenly on cue.\u00a0 Easy enough\u2026 \"gambleriver\"<\/span><\/p>\n

But they had previously hired another company who had failed because getting to the studio required riding in an elevator and the antelope would not get on the elevator.\u00a0 According to the producer who called us, they had tried to push and pull their antelope onto the elevator, and he had bucked, kicked, flailed, and generally had a frightening fit!\u00a0The producer was understandably\u00a0very concerned that the same thing not happen again because they had wasted a LOT of money that day having the entire crew waiting…<\/span><\/p>\n

I said, \u201cNo worries, we need\u00a0a week to train.\u201d He argued that it was a really easy scene, and I explained that the week was to train him to enjoy the elevator, and that I would not take the job with less.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

I got the job, and for the next five days we took our antelope to town to play on elevators.\u00a0 For the entire first day we never asked him to get on an elevator, but he got treats and praise for approaching the elevator and had a great time, and we practiced walking him over a piece of carpeting in a doorway.\u00a0 We moved his feet all over and around the elevator entrance and released pressure whenever he got near to the elevator. The second day he learned to trot into the elevator over the same piece of carpet and right back out.\u00a0 The third day the door closed and then opened right away, etc\u2026\u00a0 By the end of the week he was leading perfectly onto several different elevators and happily riding up and down, and a lot of people thought we were crazy\u2026\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

We went to the\u00a0soundstage the next week, where we met with the producer and went up to the studio.\u00a0 Of course, Gamble led onto the elevator and rode perfectly and walked into the studio and nailed the shot.\u00a0 The man smirked at me and said, \u201cI can\u2019t believe you charged me for a week of training when obviously your antelope has no problem riding the elevator.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

I tried and tried to explain to him that IF I had shown up the week before and attempted to force Gamble onto the elevator he would have behaved exactly as the other animal did, but no amount of arguing would convince him.\u00a0 I had taken some video of the prep, so I could have shown him the hours of work, but at no point during the prep did we try to force Gamble, so there was never a confrontation, never a moment that looked like there was a problem, never a moment in which Gamble was not having a good time.\u00a0 Because, as in most animal training, the best path to success was for me to be smart enough to manipulate the situation so that Gamble was able to succeed without ever really knowing that there was even an issue.<\/span><\/p>\n

If we do our jobs well as animal trainers, it creates the absolutely untrue illusion that we are doing nothing–animal\u00a0trainers generally only look like heroes when they have allowed something to fail and then appear to be saving the day\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We got a call for a project that needed an antelope lifting his head suddenly on cue.\u00a0 Easy enough\u2026 But they had previously hired another company who had failed because getting to the studio required riding in an elevator and the antelope would not get on the elevator.\u00a0 According to the producer who called us, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,46,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anecdotes","category-movie-work","category-training","category-47-id","category-46-id","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-line-bottom","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talentedanimals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}