07 Jul When Things Get Messy: What Nonlinear Training Actually Looks Like
If you’ve ever hit a wall in your training and thought, “Well, that didn’t go like I imagined,” welcome to the club. One of the things we talk about a lot at the Lab is how nonlinear analysis helps us see beyond behaviors we want to change, and into the systems we need to build.
Dallas the turkey vulture gave us a masterclass in this.
When we started weighing her, we used the go-to: differential reinforcement. Try to keep her beak off the turf scale, reinforce like mad. It worked… until it didn’t. Suddenly the scale became a site of conflict. Reinforcement history stacked up. And Dallas wasn’t the only one stuck — we were too.
So we stopped. And when we came back to it, we didn’t try to “fix” Dallas. We looked at what was missing in the environment. What needed to be built. A looping pattern. Real degrees of freedom. Value on both ends of the behavior. It wasn’t tidy. It didn’t follow a script. But the more we loosened our grip on outcome-based thinking, the more clarity we found.
That’s the essence of nonlinear analysis. Not just a different training method, but a different way of seeing.
If you’ve ever found yourself over-relying on food, stuck in reinforcement cycles, or wondering how to get more movement in your training sessions, we’ve put together a series of lessons to help unpack this. From “Is Applied Behavior Analysis Cruel?” to our constructional parrot work and a deeper look at motivation in birds of prey — each one shows a different layer of the framework we’re still evolving.
New Free Download: Linear vs. Constructional Comparison Chart
We just added a free downloadable chart that breaks down the difference between linear contingencies and the constructional approach — side-by-side. If you’ve ever wanted a quick, visual way to understand the shift to constructional training, this is it.
Click here to download the chart (free)
Want more like this? Explore the Lab to get access to the full Nonlinear Analysis page and member-only lessons.