47: Providing Purposeful Lives to Animals with Tim Sullivan, Brookfield Zoo Chicago

This episode Tim Sullivan, Brookfield Zoo Chicago and one of the founders of The ABMA, discusses how to use behavioral goals to provide purposeful lives to animals. Tim starts by giving a little history to the founding of The ABMA and then jumps into discussing why behavior is an all encompassing word. If you were at the 2024 ABMA annual conference in Nashville or if you are an ABMA member and watch Tim's environmental enrichment workshop on animalprofessional.com, this podcast episode is a great companion to his presentation. Tim educates about shifting our mindset in order to provide purposeful lives to animals. Taking ourselves away from providers and into a facilitator role, allowing animals to do the jobs that they do best! Tim also speaks to what it means to teach animals to be good learners instead of teaching animals "good" lessons and how we can all successfully navigate this shift in thinking. Stay tuned in for Tim's "Training Tale" about how he started thinking about the correlation between guest applause and the behaviors of the animal. For questions or suggestions about the podcast email abc@theabma.org and to reach Tim you can email tim.sullivan@czs.org Let's talk some training and banter about behavior!

2:30 Introduction to Tim Sullivan 

9:15 History on the founding of The ABMA 

12:50 Why is behavior an all encompassing word for training, enrichment, etc.? 

16:20 What does it mean to “Provide Purposeful Lives” to animals? 

23:25 Teaching animals how to interact with an enrichment opportunity/do a novel behavior in their free time? 

28:05 Getting started with changing the mindset

33:50 Shift in enrichment from items to experiences/opportunities

37:20 Teaching animals to be good learners, not teaching good lessons 

48:05 “Training Tales”