Training Seals is a lot like training Dogs

The bearded seal, Bella, waves to the trainer and audience.

Today I had the privilege of going to see the seals at Polaria in Tromsø being fed and trained. A friend (and ex-student of mine) is working at Polaria and brought me along with her. The seal that is most visible in the video is a bearded seal, and this particular one weighs 286 kg. So it is fairly obvious that you cannot force these animals to do what you want it too. Everything is taught using positive reinforcement, target and shaping. Natural behaviors are "captured", not by the click of the clicker but with whistles.

The seals natural tendency to investigate things with their whiskers is one of the behaviors that has been "captured" and is here used in a trick to demonstrate to the audience how well these animals control their whiskers. This is Mai San, she is also the seal that is in the video.

 In the video the seal first fetches two different objects after being told which one to get. This is a fairly complicated form of fetch, one that dogs (to my knowledge) doesn't compete in. Dogs can be sent to retrieve objects to the left or right in some obedience competitions, but not to discriminate between two different objects by name. Anyway, this is just a small part of what you can do if you train your animal, be that dog or seal. The second half of the video, the trainer, Børre, first explains what is means to use "cues" and then the trainer and seal show us how it should be done :)

And come on, if these trainers can get the seals to do this by positive reinforcement training, I bet you can teach your dog to sit, walk nicely on the leash and any other command you might need, by using the same methods.