Marine mammal training: the history of training animals for medical behaviors and keys to their success

Abstract

The training of both domestic and exotic species for participation in medical behaviors is a helpful tool in the care and management of individual animals. The practice of training individual animals to help in their own health care is difficult to trace back to its origins. The use of these techniques on large exotic mammals became commonplace only as recently as the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, the practice seems to have been perfected and made popular with marine mammal species, starting in the 1970s. The development of better training techniques for a variety of medical behaviors is a foundational key worth examining and has been proven to be applicable across species.