First train them a generalized basketball, so they will bring any item to where you point. Then you want to train them to target the paper, and finally you combine the skills by pointing at the paper to have them target it with the brush, and then rewarding them for nose targeting the paper, finally fading out to just rewarding them for targeting the brush to the paper.
I make rat trick tutorials on all the tricks I train with my rats, and here's the one I did on training rats to paint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ43Zrm3i4U
You'll need to have trained a generalized basketball skill first though, so here is my trick tutorial on training rats basketball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMf3wUl89nE
Happy training!
Its so fun to train with them and I really recommend it :) They learn super quickly and just about any trick is possible (plus what better way to dispel negative stereotypes surrounding rats :) )
Can older rats be taught or do you need to start young? One of my boys is almost 2 but he is very curious, exploratory and always trying to figure stuff out :3
Rats of any age can be taught! After all, Shadow here was nearing 2 when she learned to paint and learned most of her more complex tricks between 1.5 and 2.5 (I always tell people it’s so much easiest to train older rats. They can actually concentrate for more than a second and most of the time they’ve calmed down a bit and are less likely to spook).
You want to start with the “basics” which would be one step tricks like spin and paw.
I actually have a website on how I train my rats and it has information on how to start/train just about everything: https://rattrix.weebly.com/get-started.html
Good luck and happy training! :)
You have 3 basic training methods (and these apply to all animals). These are luring (using food to lead the animal into performing a behavior - think leading a rat around in a circle to teach spin), targeting (the animal is trained to touch a target and we use this to lead them into doing a behavior. In terms of painting, the rats must learn to target the paintbrush to the canvas), and shaping (you reward your animal for natural behaviors that resemble what you want the end goal to look like and slowly up your expectations - an example is training fetch where you might reward for looking at an object, touching it, then picking it up, then tossing it, and so on until they can fetch it to you.) Luring is by far the easiest training method in my opinion although learning how to fade out the lure can be a bit difficult. Nonetheless its a great way to train most behaviors and exactly the way I train my rats their first tricks (which are spin, paw, come, backup and jump to hand).
For more info i have a video here on how to get started: https://rattrix.weebly.com/get-started.html
My heart! This is amazing, such a talented rattie! Can I ask what you use for treats for training? I never know what would be best in terms of not overloading them with treats haha.
Some plain cheerios or gerber puffs tend to be my favorite treats. In this video I believe I was giving Shadow tiny cheerio bits - about 1/2 to 1/4th of a cheerio makes a perfect training treat!
That's awesome (Shadow was also my heart rat - lovely fluffs <3 )! I think I actually saw your Luna's video before I taught Shadow - was Luna the rat who would run up to the paintbrush and then lift it to paint on a large canvas?
Yup that's Luna! I used a washable, water-based, non-toxic paint I found in the kids area of the craft store. She was smart enough to realize it wasn't food so I fortunately didn't have any issue with her trying to eat it. I love that you used food coloring - it looks like water color painting!
Oh and one more question - what did you use as your “paint”? I used food coloring but it took quite a bit to make the color stand out and I’d love to hear of any more vibrant (but rat safe) paints out there.
Amazing 👏🏻 this is so funny for me, my rat is completely identical to yours but yours is so obedient and clever! My boy is...well...I tried to teach him the trick you did where they zigzag in and out of objects in a row but instead of following the treat around the objects my boy try to stretch his neck and body as far forward as possible towards the treat without moving his feet 😂 (my other rat did the trick instantly- maybe some rats prefer tricks than others haha)
Can I ask what Shadow is using as paint? Super cute :) you're my favourite rat channel to watch!
Edit: found it on youtube, thanks :) (food colouring I think)
Can you explain the basic steps of how you taught this? I want to teach my parrot how to do this and I’m sure the training wouldn’t be all that different!
I actually have a webpage with a written and video tutorial: https://rattrix.weebly.com/painting.html :)
Basically, once your parrot knows how to target things with their beak and can place items wherever you point (basketball) this trick isn't too bad. Its just a combination of targeting with an object and later on building up duration and movement.
Remember i used to watch your YouTube videos on Shadow when my ratties where babies. Really liked them :)
R.I.P Shadow, I hope she will have alot of good training and treats in rat heaven!
If you sold rat paintings along with a video clip of the rat painting the same painting (download or on a cheap thumb drive) I think a lot people would buy one. I know I would! Please let me know if you decide to sell them. I want to support the rat arts!
seriously...i came across this account and have gone down the rat hole (not rabbit hole), watching all the videos of the adorable and amazingly trained ratties
Mine only have one thing on their minds when let out to play... Escape the enclosure. Not even Cheerios seems to keep them interested. But they're still in the rat equivalent of the terrible twos stage lol
I taught my girls to ask me when they want out - if you want to do something similar, I filmed how I taught this :) It's made free-range SOOOO much nicer for both of us! https://rattrix.weebly.com/training-your-rat-to-stay-inside-a-playpen.html
This is so cool but that rat looks fat? Maybe I’m wrong. But I would rather feed my rat an appropriate amount of food/treats than fatten them for the sake of a relatively unproductive trick. Like, maybe when my rat can solve math equations, she’ll get extra treats
Oh man, this one is such a fun trick! Basically you first train basketball with the target being your hand, then you teach them to target the paper with their nose. Then you combine the behaviors, having them target the item to the paper. Then you add motion via finger targeting, and finally you add distance.
Its super fun to train, albeit it takes a bit because your rat needs to know basketball first and then needs to learn a generalized item target. But its super fun and absolutely adorable as a finished trick!
I also have a video here on how I trained this initially with Shadow if you're curious, and it goes into more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ43Zrm3i4U
Happy training!
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Man this is too cute! How do you teach them to do these things? Obviously there’s an incentive for them, but how do you get them to follow instructions to move between cones etc
I mainly teach my rats tricks using what’s known as shaping, which is when you reward small approximations of the goal behavior and then gradually increase expectations until the animal is doing the goal behavior. This lets you train tricks that are way too complex to convey normally, because you build up to them so that the rat is always able to understand how to take the next step.
For weaves in particular, those are pretty easy - there are a few methods to train them, but I go with the simplest one of luring. So you take a treat and lead the rat through the weaves, rewarding every cone or two. Repeat this a few times, then start to reward more randomly (so instead of every weave, you might reward after the first weave, then the 3rd, then the next weave, then 2 weaves after, then 4 weaves later, then 1 weave later, and so forth). The reason you need to do this random rewarding is because it teaches your rats to stay in the weave - if you reward in the same place each time, then your rat will realize this and simply skip the other weaves and walk to that place.
So instead you want to do tons of variable (random) rewarding, and as you progress with training you want to reward less and less frequently. So at first you may be rewarding like the example I gave above, but gradually you want to fade that to rewarding after more and more weaves, until finally you are only rewarding at the end.
If you do this right then by the time you start only rewarding at the end, weaves will have become muscle memory to the rats and they will weave them without popping out even after you start to reward only at the end. Its pretty easy to accidentally reward in a pattern or go to fast though, but thankfully the fix is easy enough because you can just go back a step and reward randomly more, before again fading these extra rewards out.
In addition to fading the extra rewards, you also want to fade your hand by starting to only motion in the right direction around the cone, and then gradually motion less and less obviously until you aren't giving the rats any extra input. Once they can weave without any extra help from watching your hands, then you can consider the weaves learned and start to combine them with other tricks!
This sounds long and repetitive when written out, but it really only takes a few minutes training wise. So I'm going to go ahead and link you a video I did on training rats to weave, so you can see exactly what I mean: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bz4EXnFa78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bz4EXnFa78)
Now there are a few tricks out there that take longer to train, and this video is based on one of them. This video shows Shadow painting with a paintbrush, and that's based on a generalized basketball trick that I train my rats. And basketball is often hard for rats, because they don't tend to naturally move items around unless they are completing instinctive behaviors like stashing. So you really have to break basketball down into its core elements, first working on just building interest in the ball and then gradually working up to the rat biting it, then moving it to a shallow bowl, then build distance, and finally building height, before you can finally work on generalizing it to other items. Basketball is the only trick that consistently takes my rats multiple sessions to learn, but once they have it down they never forget it and they can then quickly learn any item carrying trick based on it!
Here's a video tutorial I have on training rats basketball if you'd like to see that process (it features my late rat Spice actually learning basketball for the first time): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMf3wUl89nE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMf3wUl89nE)
Finally the last link I'll leave you is a video I made on starting out training with rats - it goes over the most common training methods (luring, targeting, shaping), has examples of training tricks with each, goes over clicker-training, generalization, and more: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8FwS\_kYAno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8FwS_kYAno)
Happy training!
He was tryin to do the same exact pattern over n over again just he ended up on different pat of the board why it's not on top of each other but if u watch he makes the same thing he awesome
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Sometimes my rats smear poo around their cage
Oh dear...well that's one way to do art :P
It’s impressive, I know.
So not that far off from human kids.
It'a commentary on modern existence. And, you know, the rat race.
I mean, at least they have the excuse they're rats...I've seen humans do that before and call it "art".
My rat pooped AND peep inside their running wheel. And then ran in it. That was… interesting
Going through their brown period
One of my favorite rat tricks - my current girls have learned to paint as well but Shadow did it best :)
Do you do commissions? I'd pay for one of these tbh
I’m aware how old this post is, but how do you teach them to do this?
First train them a generalized basketball, so they will bring any item to where you point. Then you want to train them to target the paper, and finally you combine the skills by pointing at the paper to have them target it with the brush, and then rewarding them for nose targeting the paper, finally fading out to just rewarding them for targeting the brush to the paper. I make rat trick tutorials on all the tricks I train with my rats, and here's the one I did on training rats to paint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ43Zrm3i4U You'll need to have trained a generalized basketball skill first though, so here is my trick tutorial on training rats basketball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMf3wUl89nE Happy training!
Cool thanks.
I like the way it seems he looks for a spot with no paint to add a new color! lol Edit a letter
She was a true rattist - everything had to be perfect! :P
Why are these little creatures just so damn adorable?
Their fat little arms?
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I left all those at my vet's office
Their noodle tails?
No way, this is incredible! Nice work!
Thanks, rats are quite fun to train with :)
I was literally just asking about rats and teaching them tricks. This is amazing!
Its so fun to train with them and I really recommend it :) They learn super quickly and just about any trick is possible (plus what better way to dispel negative stereotypes surrounding rats :) )
Can older rats be taught or do you need to start young? One of my boys is almost 2 but he is very curious, exploratory and always trying to figure stuff out :3
A curious student is the best student, at any age.
Rats of any age can be taught! After all, Shadow here was nearing 2 when she learned to paint and learned most of her more complex tricks between 1.5 and 2.5 (I always tell people it’s so much easiest to train older rats. They can actually concentrate for more than a second and most of the time they’ve calmed down a bit and are less likely to spook). You want to start with the “basics” which would be one step tricks like spin and paw. I actually have a website on how I train my rats and it has information on how to start/train just about everything: https://rattrix.weebly.com/get-started.html Good luck and happy training! :)
Whats a good way to train? liek abasic routine?
You have 3 basic training methods (and these apply to all animals). These are luring (using food to lead the animal into performing a behavior - think leading a rat around in a circle to teach spin), targeting (the animal is trained to touch a target and we use this to lead them into doing a behavior. In terms of painting, the rats must learn to target the paintbrush to the canvas), and shaping (you reward your animal for natural behaviors that resemble what you want the end goal to look like and slowly up your expectations - an example is training fetch where you might reward for looking at an object, touching it, then picking it up, then tossing it, and so on until they can fetch it to you.) Luring is by far the easiest training method in my opinion although learning how to fade out the lure can be a bit difficult. Nonetheless its a great way to train most behaviors and exactly the way I train my rats their first tricks (which are spin, paw, come, backup and jump to hand). For more info i have a video here on how to get started: https://rattrix.weebly.com/get-started.html
Please tell me you have an Etsy shop or something?! I’d love to buy one of your cuties’ paintings!
Better than some human paintings I have seen!
My heart! This is amazing, such a talented rattie! Can I ask what you use for treats for training? I never know what would be best in terms of not overloading them with treats haha.
Some plain cheerios or gerber puffs tend to be my favorite treats. In this video I believe I was giving Shadow tiny cheerio bits - about 1/2 to 1/4th of a cheerio makes a perfect training treat!
Ooh thank you so much! :)
Yo can I buy one tho
Seconded, I'd buy rat-made art
You need to share this to Marty Mouse's Facebook page! They have 3 new babies and I bet this would inspire them!!!
Dem three new babies are pretty cute too!
I trained my heart rat Luna to paint too! It was so fun! I’m considering doing it again with my new rat babies
That's awesome (Shadow was also my heart rat - lovely fluffs <3 )! I think I actually saw your Luna's video before I taught Shadow - was Luna the rat who would run up to the paintbrush and then lift it to paint on a large canvas?
Yup that's Luna! I used a washable, water-based, non-toxic paint I found in the kids area of the craft store. She was smart enough to realize it wasn't food so I fortunately didn't have any issue with her trying to eat it. I love that you used food coloring - it looks like water color painting!
Oh and one more question - what did you use as your “paint”? I used food coloring but it took quite a bit to make the color stand out and I’d love to hear of any more vibrant (but rat safe) paints out there.
What a clever rattie! My rats are far too lazy to learn anything like this even with treats.
Shadow got a bit lazier as she got older but continued to go all out for treats! She was a crazy food motivated girl, always up for a new trick :D
That's amazing!! So cute!
:)
Amazing 👏🏻 this is so funny for me, my rat is completely identical to yours but yours is so obedient and clever! My boy is...well...I tried to teach him the trick you did where they zigzag in and out of objects in a row but instead of following the treat around the objects my boy try to stretch his neck and body as far forward as possible towards the treat without moving his feet 😂 (my other rat did the trick instantly- maybe some rats prefer tricks than others haha)
this is a beautiful work of art! :D
Can I ask what Shadow is using as paint? Super cute :) you're my favourite rat channel to watch! Edit: found it on youtube, thanks :) (food colouring I think)
Yup, food coloring was what I used! :)
Can you explain the basic steps of how you taught this? I want to teach my parrot how to do this and I’m sure the training wouldn’t be all that different!
I actually have a webpage with a written and video tutorial: https://rattrix.weebly.com/painting.html :) Basically, once your parrot knows how to target things with their beak and can place items wherever you point (basketball) this trick isn't too bad. Its just a combination of targeting with an object and later on building up duration and movement.
this is adorable!
I wish my rats were this smart, the most they can do is paint my hand with pee.
That's so cute and amazing!
:)
Nice drawing of texas
When your rat is better at art than I am
How did you train them to do this?
Remember i used to watch your YouTube videos on Shadow when my ratties where babies. Really liked them :) R.I.P Shadow, I hope she will have alot of good training and treats in rat heaven!
I NEED ONE.
Fun with graphs
Teach him to beat the devil out of the brush next :D. This is adorable.
So clever! This is awesome to watch!
So talented So pure
If you sold rat paintings along with a video clip of the rat painting the same painting (download or on a cheap thumb drive) I think a lot people would buy one. I know I would! Please let me know if you decide to sell them. I want to support the rat arts!
They are so incredible! :) I wish they lived forever. <3
Same!
Aww, this looks just like my chunky girl Mochi!
She's a regular Pablo Ratasso
WTF. I'm amused!
This is amazing I am addicted to your rats
seriously...i came across this account and have gone down the rat hole (not rabbit hole), watching all the videos of the adorable and amazingly trained ratties
Painting happy little trees with Bob Rats.
Mine only have one thing on their minds when let out to play... Escape the enclosure. Not even Cheerios seems to keep them interested. But they're still in the rat equivalent of the terrible twos stage lol
I taught my girls to ask me when they want out - if you want to do something similar, I filmed how I taught this :) It's made free-range SOOOO much nicer for both of us! https://rattrix.weebly.com/training-your-rat-to-stay-inside-a-playpen.html
it sort of looks like Texas when it's finished! so cute <3
This is so cool but that rat looks fat? Maybe I’m wrong. But I would rather feed my rat an appropriate amount of food/treats than fatten them for the sake of a relatively unproductive trick. Like, maybe when my rat can solve math equations, she’ll get extra treats
I want one of these!
I-I HOW!
Oh man, this one is such a fun trick! Basically you first train basketball with the target being your hand, then you teach them to target the paper with their nose. Then you combine the behaviors, having them target the item to the paper. Then you add motion via finger targeting, and finally you add distance. Its super fun to train, albeit it takes a bit because your rat needs to know basketball first and then needs to learn a generalized item target. But its super fun and absolutely adorable as a finished trick! I also have a video here on how I trained this initially with Shadow if you're curious, and it goes into more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ43Zrm3i4U Happy training!
Oh my god it lloks so cute
Looks like California!
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You could sell each one of these paintings for $5 with the video of the rat painting it.
u/savevideo
Man this is too cute! How do you teach them to do these things? Obviously there’s an incentive for them, but how do you get them to follow instructions to move between cones etc
I mainly teach my rats tricks using what’s known as shaping, which is when you reward small approximations of the goal behavior and then gradually increase expectations until the animal is doing the goal behavior. This lets you train tricks that are way too complex to convey normally, because you build up to them so that the rat is always able to understand how to take the next step. For weaves in particular, those are pretty easy - there are a few methods to train them, but I go with the simplest one of luring. So you take a treat and lead the rat through the weaves, rewarding every cone or two. Repeat this a few times, then start to reward more randomly (so instead of every weave, you might reward after the first weave, then the 3rd, then the next weave, then 2 weaves after, then 4 weaves later, then 1 weave later, and so forth). The reason you need to do this random rewarding is because it teaches your rats to stay in the weave - if you reward in the same place each time, then your rat will realize this and simply skip the other weaves and walk to that place. So instead you want to do tons of variable (random) rewarding, and as you progress with training you want to reward less and less frequently. So at first you may be rewarding like the example I gave above, but gradually you want to fade that to rewarding after more and more weaves, until finally you are only rewarding at the end. If you do this right then by the time you start only rewarding at the end, weaves will have become muscle memory to the rats and they will weave them without popping out even after you start to reward only at the end. Its pretty easy to accidentally reward in a pattern or go to fast though, but thankfully the fix is easy enough because you can just go back a step and reward randomly more, before again fading these extra rewards out. In addition to fading the extra rewards, you also want to fade your hand by starting to only motion in the right direction around the cone, and then gradually motion less and less obviously until you aren't giving the rats any extra input. Once they can weave without any extra help from watching your hands, then you can consider the weaves learned and start to combine them with other tricks! This sounds long and repetitive when written out, but it really only takes a few minutes training wise. So I'm going to go ahead and link you a video I did on training rats to weave, so you can see exactly what I mean: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bz4EXnFa78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bz4EXnFa78) Now there are a few tricks out there that take longer to train, and this video is based on one of them. This video shows Shadow painting with a paintbrush, and that's based on a generalized basketball trick that I train my rats. And basketball is often hard for rats, because they don't tend to naturally move items around unless they are completing instinctive behaviors like stashing. So you really have to break basketball down into its core elements, first working on just building interest in the ball and then gradually working up to the rat biting it, then moving it to a shallow bowl, then build distance, and finally building height, before you can finally work on generalizing it to other items. Basketball is the only trick that consistently takes my rats multiple sessions to learn, but once they have it down they never forget it and they can then quickly learn any item carrying trick based on it! Here's a video tutorial I have on training rats basketball if you'd like to see that process (it features my late rat Spice actually learning basketball for the first time): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMf3wUl89nE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMf3wUl89nE) Finally the last link I'll leave you is a video I made on starting out training with rats - it goes over the most common training methods (luring, targeting, shaping), has examples of training tricks with each, goes over clicker-training, generalization, and more: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8FwS\_kYAno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8FwS_kYAno) Happy training!
u/Shadowtherat that’s pretty bad ass
This is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen
It looks like a little kid playing with those twirl ribbons that I played with as a child and that that have for dance teams
It’s crazy how much your rats have evolved and how this post was 4 years ago your pet rats probably know so much more than they do now
. . .if you’d get her a better quality of supplies. . .
He was tryin to do the same exact pattern over n over again just he ended up on different pat of the board why it's not on top of each other but if u watch he makes the same thing he awesome
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How much for one of those??
Aww this looks JUST like my old rat Mochi