#touch training

[flyingpurplepeopleprogrammer]

I can't really stress enough that, well - you and me?

<disco> We're animals, baby. </disco>

All of us are, really, and if you're looking to interact with any kind of animal you would do very, very well to learn about animal training. I'll probably write about this in a more general sense in the future, but for today, let's specifically talk about Touch Training:

Usually, one of the first things you do when training an animal - any animal - is acclimate it to its handler's touch. A properly touch-trained animal should be perfectly comfortable being manipulated by its handler and makes a whole host of training and care tasks both easier for the trainer and less stressful for the animal being trained.

To give an example, imagine an animal has sustained a minor injury - a dog picked up a thorn, say. Even a friendly and tame animal won't often want to be picked up and physically handled while it's in pain. It may resist being handled or even - at no fault of its own - bite or scratch in a bid to protect itself. Taking the time to touch train your pet will make sure that you can borrow its paw, pluck the thorn, and treat it's wound without risking further harm to yourself or the poor animal. Because the animal is used to being handled - because it trusts you - what would normally be a stressful experience becomes a comforting one.

The usual method for touch training is to consistently and gently manipulate the animal in the presence of positive stimuli. Sometimes, touching isn't an option to start with and you need to start with just being allowed near or around your subject. A good way to start this process is to be around the animal to provide it something positive that it needs, like food when it's hungry or warmth when it's cold. Over time, you can move from sitting near to lightly touching, and so on.

In the longer term, you should be able to systematically manipulate every part of the animal's body as though you were inspecting it, rewarding the animal as needed to encourage submission to the procedure. The purpose here is to make sure that it is comfortable with all kinds of handling and that it positively associates being physically manipulated. Ideally, flopping over and offering itself to be touched should be a positive experience for the animal being trained.

Physical contact and affection are themselves positive stimuli for many creatures you might want to train as a pet or service animal. In addition to making the process of touch training easier, this has the pleasant side effect of making the training practically self-reinforcing. Routine activities such as grooming, cuddling, and play will reinforce the connection between the handler's touch and Good Things in the mind of the animal being trained and help form a bond between the animal and its handler. Just make sure that you don't unwittingly countertrain the behaviour, and it should persist without much effort.

Particular to humans, initial training can be made remarkably simpler by just explaining the process to a willing participant and encouraging active cooperation. Training tools like visualisation or roleplay can be used to train cognitive behaviours directly and can facilitate extremely rapid and robust training, with skilled handlers showing adequately touch-trained subjects in less than a day.

[planetaryacceleration]

[your-fuccked-up-dad-volume61]

[inkbery]

nap time

[snekky-arts]

sorry i'm late i was busy with the existential crisis of it all

anyway, have something that gave me so much trouble but i think it turned out kinda well

also, this and the rest of this series are available on my Inprnt!!

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6

[nayrring]

Obanai after getting scolded by mitsuri for mistreating tanjiro during training :

[olessan]

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Míriel + Elendil + Flourishing Touch

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

pre angelic revelation, the hotel crew goes looking for Vaggie about some managerial thing and regularly finds her kickboxing in a spare room, beating the crap out of a dummy dressed up in an exorcist's gear and mask

a totally normal way to blow off steam, and one that they sometimes also find Charlie spectating at-

("Aren't you supposed to be against all this violence and shit?" - "Yes! But no actual exorcists are being hurt during this stress relief slash training session! So it's OK!" - "Yeah right. And you think your girlfriend looks hot punching stuff huh." - "Hm? Sorry Husk, I wasn't listening- what did you say?" - "......")

which all well and good!

until AFTER the angelic revelation.....

Charlie: "Vaggie. Please don't tell me that's actually YOUR exorcist armor."

Vaggie: "...."

Charlie: "Don't say you've been punching your old exorcist mask, imagining your own face under it."

Vaggie: "......"

Charlie: "I do NOT want to hear that you've been beating up on your past self this entire time- while I was watching! -and using punishing yourself by proxy as a way to cope when you're stressing over feeling like you're not doing enough here and now."

Vaggie: "........."

Charlie: "Vaggie why aren't you SAYING anything!?"

Vaggie: "You told me not to!"

Charlie: "ARGH!!!!"

post revelation, Husk goes looking for Vaggie in the training room like usual, and finds her standing helplessly in front of the exorcist training dummy as a tearful Charlie clings protectively to it with a full body hug

husk decides restocking the bar can wait. he's not getting paid enough to deal with This

[rhupi]

Team minato but rin and obito swap roles

Besties SWAP AU

Edit: forgor to add this

[inkskinned]

love when men cry about body hair bc "it's hygiene" and yet 15% of cis men leave the bathroom without washing their hands at all and an additional 35% only just wet their hands without using soap. that is nearly half of all men. that means statistically you have probably shaken hands with or been in direct contact with one of these people.

love when men say that women "only want money" when it turns out that even in equal-earning homes, women are actually adding caregiver burdens and housework from previous years, whereas men have been expanding leisure time and hobbies. in equal-earning households, men spend an average of 3.5 hours extra in leisure time per week, which is 182 hours per year - a little over a week of paid vacation time that the other partner does not receive. kinda sounds like he wants her money.

love that men have decided women are frail and weak and annoying when we scream in surprise but it turns out it's actually women who are more reliable in an emergency because men need to be convinced to actually take action and respond to the threat. like, actually, for-real: men experience such a strong sense of pride about their pre-supposed abilities that it gets them and their families killed. they are so used to dismissing women that it literally kills them.

love it. told my father this and he said there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. a year ago i tried to get him to evacuate the house during a flash flood. he ignored me and got injured. he has told me, laughing, that he never washes his hands. he has said in the last week that women are just happier when we're cooking or cleaning.

maybe i'm overly nostalgic. but it didn't used to feel so fucking bleak. it used to feel like at least a little shameful to consider women to be sheep. it just feels like the earth is round and we are still having conversations about it being flat - except these conversations are about the most obvious forms of patriarchy. like, we know about this stuff. we've known since well before the 50's.

recently andrew tate tried to justify cheating on his partner as being the "male prerogative." i don't know what the prerogative for the rest of us would be. just sitting at home, watching the slow erosion of our humanity.

[shortnotsweet]

[ “SOMEBODY TOLD ME”]:

BREAKING MY BACK JUST TO KNOW YOUR NAME. SEVENTEEN TRACKS AND I’VE HAD IT WITH THIS GAME. A BREAKIN’ MY BACK JUST TO KNOW YOUR NAME—BUT HEAVEN AIN’T CLOSE IN A PLACE LIKE THIS.

— The Killers, Hot Fuss (2004)

Princess Rhaenyra’s insolence is wearing her stepmother’s patience thin. Queen Alicent is not ten years her senior, but even during her own sixteenth year, she cannot recall herself behaving so brazenly. She would never burst into courtly discussions in nothing but gilded armor and the underskirts of her riding leathers, awash in blood. (She would never be spotted in blood that was not her own, anyway. Alicent has never picked up a sword, not one that belonged to her.) Nevermind that Rhaenyra is attending to diplomatic affairs with bared teeth and scales, no—the crux of the matter is just that, her affairs. Rhaenyra is the Realm’s Delight, a beauty incomparable to any fair maiden, Alicent included. She indulges herself with appetite of a spoiled child, the confidence of man, and the pickings befitting only to her royal blood. Criston Cole. Daemon Targaryen. Harwin Strong. Laena Velaryon. She’s full of love, isn’t she? That selfish, foolish girl. What does Rhaenyra Targaryen know of love, of duty? She is a child in so many ways—she thinks killing makes her a man, thinks the throne is hers despite being a woman, thinks she can have her knight and her uncle and her protector and Laena Velaryon in one fail swoop. She’s wrong. She doesn’t know herself half as well as Alicent does. Alicent, who sees her for what she truly is, who wants to see all of her and more of her and none of her. Alicent has been stolen into the Keep by her own father—both of their fathers—but Rhaenyra is the key to this place, is the window to everything barred. Rhaenyra Targaryen has a dragon. Rhaenyra can fly.

That’s what Rhaenyra had promised her once, with her lips pulled back in a grin, exposing the white of her teeth like the violently radiant creature she was. “Perhaps when you grow tired of plotting against me, we shall ride on dragonback together,” she had said. The tease.

Alicent had yanked her into an empty corridor by the silk of her sleeve, ready to chastise her for her ill behavior. Conversing with the lords and ladies of the court at a feast was one thing, but chattering about her bloody encounters in battle over the pudding tureen were another. The lord at her elbow was going green. Alicent’s own face was likely red; her heart raced whenever Rhaenyra got like this. Alicent had never seen the battlefield—only seen battered men in dented armor and the slumps of corpses lined along dirt roads in the aftermath of war—but her own imagination terrified her like nothing else.

(Rhaenyra is better with a sword than half of the knights in Westeros, and more lovely than the lot. Her reign has not yet begun, but already the commoners flock to her—lured in by tales of her beauty and fine hair—and soldiers would follow her into battle. Alicent would not follow, but she would watch and bite her nails down to the quick.

She thinks of the figure Rhaenyra cuts in full armor, the heat in her gaze underneath the slots of her helmet. Alicent remembers the weight of her own hand in Rhaenyra’s—which was gloved—when the princess rode up to the spectators box and grasped it in her own, bringing Alicent’s knuckles to her lips. She thinks of Rhaenyra murdered in the sky, skewered with another man’s sword, plummeting to the ground, torn in half, streaking crimson across the clouds. Alicent would scream, or cry. She might laugh. She would throw herself from the window of her tower. Rhaenyra’s bloody exploits terrified Alicent for reasons she could not identify, and excited her for reasons she refused to.)

“I’d sooner be confined to the castle for the rest of my days than get on the back of that bloody lizard,” Alicent scoffed. Rhaenyra only tucked her hand over Alicent’s, where it was resting on her forearm. She flexed her fingers, moving to release her grip on the dark fabric, but Rhaenyra intertwined their fingers and held them fast.

“You’re confined already. You are already accustomed to such a thing. I know you. But—”

“But you forget yourself. You think you’re invulnerable, Rhaenyra. You don’t know who you are.” Alicent intends for it to be a sneer, but instead it comes out quietly, and too gentle for disdain. She can’t know. Rhaenyra is as trapped as she is, but they’re trapped together. They belong together. She belongs with Alicent.

“I am Rhaenyra Targaryen, Heir to the Iron Throne and all of Westeros. I am a dragonrider. I am—I am your daughter. In a way. Your sister, too. Your enemy. Your sword, your shield.”

“And what am I?” What else is left for me? Alicent wonders.

“My Queen. For now.” Rhaenyra cocks her head, and the gleam in her eyes burns like fire raining down. “When I am Queen, you will be my lady.”

[your-fuccked-up-dad-volume61]

[inkbery]

Three hundred years, and I'm the first Viking who wouldn't kill a dragon.

[httyd-art-requests]

May I request a nonbinary colored Terrible Terror? Love those little guys!

I love that the first pride request is also one of my own flags <3 Shaking your hand

Dragon #87 - Non-Binary Terrible Terror

[darkfantasyprincess23]

When I'm trying to be a big girl but have to start drooling when daddy calls me his stupid blondie baby💕

and my tits automatically answer yes and in my head is aghh yes daddy yes yes yes, it's so hard to resist to defend🫠