I wonder if it would be possible to train crows and possibly other birds like sea gulls to pick up litter and deposit it in exchange for a treat. If they did take to the training could they possibly pass these same skills on to wild birds?
What are other possible jobs that could utilize wildlife?Show dolphins are trained to retrieve litter from their tanks and bring it back to the trainer.
The story is told (from Sea Life Park, Honolulu, I think), one dolphin started bringing whole bunches of brown paper bag pieces back to the trainer, one piece at a time, getting a fish for each. (The trainer stands on a deck projecting part way out over the water.) After a while, the trainer began to wonder where the dolphin is getting all these pieces of paper. So he dives into the water to have a look.
Turned out, somebody had dropped a grocery sack into the water. The dolphin had it hidden beneath the trainer’s deck, and was tearing off little pieces one at a time to bring to the trainer.
See, it’s the vast number of stories like this (sometimes the plural of anecdote really might be data), that lead some people to feel that it’s better to assume than not to assume that dolphins’ brains work at some level a lot like peoples’ brains.
If you’re talking about captive animals, sure, it’s possible. It’s a common presentation/show behavior, taught to lots of species in lots of facilities.
But I don’t know about teaching it to wild animals. It’s not just one behavior, it’s a chain. To an animal trainer it looks something like this:
Cue: See/recognise target (piece of trash)
Behavior: Go to it
Cue: Once close enough to target…
Behavior: Pick up target
Cue: Once holding target…
Behavior: Keep holding it while traveling to station
Cue: Once holding target at station
Behavior: Drop target
And only then would the animal get it’s reinforcement - the treat.
Now for trained animals, that already have the neural pathways, a chain can be reinforcing in itself, and percieving the cue for the next behavior becomes a reinforcer, as it’s another chance to “get paid.” But even a smart problem-solver like a crow or raccoon might not have that pathway in place, and watching another animal do it, as postulated in the OP, doesn’t work for all species, or even all individuals within a species. If you watch a snooker player pot the black, does that mean you can do it too? (Not a sports person, but figured this was the place for a metaphor!)
The other issue here is that feeding wild animals makes them cease to be wild. The kind of high-value reinforcement required for learning and carrying out this chain would likely affect the animal’s behaviors (e.g., foraging, migrating, breeding, etc.) I mean, whatever treat you use to reinforce the chain, in order for it to be reinforcing, it’s got to be better and more consistently available than the animal’s natural food source - and if you’re providing that kind of food to wildlife, you’ll be having some kind of effect on their ecological niche.
There’s probably too much litter for that to ever be effective.
How about working on the problem from the other end, and training crows to attack people who drop litter?
I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the plan to train crows to pick up litter. It would be cost-prohibitive to raise, train, maintain and pay rewards to an army of crows commensurate to the task. There would also have to be costly human wranglers, trainers and monitors, who could probably pick up the trash themselves with higher quality control outcomes, and with less time and effort than supervising the corvine subcontractors. Not to mention the pots and pans and old shoes and truck retreads and abandoned refrigerators that the crows cannot lift.
It could be done. Crows are very smart.
But, they would soon organize, demand nutritional treats, shorter work hours, healthcare, maternity leave, daycare and pensions.
I remember one bird who worked to eliminate litter: Woodsy the anti-littering owl. “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!” Woodsy Owl 1977 TV public service announcement - YouTube
How do you teach them the difference between litter and, say, the papers in someone’s homework or the shopping list that someone is holding? I can picture them mobbing someone with a small paper coffee cup.
I think if the trainer was willing to work on it, it would be possible to differentiate “thing on the ground” from “thing in person’s possession.” The problem would be supervision - making sure stolen goods aren’t paid for.
It didn’t work out too well when they used bears to do it: Walt Disney - In The Bag - 1956 - YouTube bump, bump
Possibly.
Joshua Klein demonstrated that crows can train themselves to pick up coins and deposit them into a vending machine.
Generalizing that to different kinds of litter is the problem.
I’m guessing it’s difficult to train birds that aren’t in captivity. Perhaps raised and trained in captivity they’d keep up the practice of picking up litter for food instead of finding other food, except litter often contains food.
But if you can get it started you want to use MLM techniques with crows. They not only get treats for picking up litter, but more treats for training other crows to do it as well. Offer something like a gold nest to the crows that reach the highest levels of the pyramid 
I have 2 puddles of water in the street in front of my shop, they are about 10 feet apart. 2 crows use these puddles to soak chicken bones. Each crow has his own puddle and will occasionaly steal a soaking bone from the others puddle but for the most part they seem to respect each others space. The street makes the water pretty hot and seems to cook the chicken off the bone. I htought this was pretty smart behavior.
But like any MLM scam, that breaks down once you get a few levels down from the top, where the scam depends on recruiting armies of dupes who think the can get rich too. That requires lots of dumb dupes. Crows are probably smarter than that.
I swear to Og, the first three or four times I saw this thread title it read, “Trained cows…”
Me too. That’s why I didn’t bother to read it.
But Crows, they are a different story. Smarter than… well, …
They see, they process, they adjust. I only hope they don’t plan revenge. :eek:
Fuckers are smarter than they need to be, for a fucking flying garbage can.
There is a great PBS show about them. I think it was an episode of* NOVA. * I’m sure the fucking crows can give you original air date and episode number.
They do. They’re pretty famous for it, actually - piss off a crow, and it’ll get the whole flock to hate you. They can even teach later generations to recognize you & keep up the feud.
Take your stinking claws off me, you damned dirty crow!
I think it would totally be possible to train bears as crossing guards. No way would someone driving by a school want to mess with a bear so they would naturally slow down for the kids. And yes I can hear what you’re saying, “But, but, but the bears will eat the children!” Well, lucky for you I am a doper and thus super smart and I have already solved that problem. Have each child carry a 5lb fish in their backpack throughout the day and then when they leave to go home they can feed the fish to the bears to keep the bears full so they won’t eat the children.
One minor flaw in that otherwise brilliant plan:
“Fish-scented children.” :eek: