Aquarium of the Pacific

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Hugging A Seal by Hugh

Hugh Ryono

Aquarium of the Pacific's Vet Tech Colleen gives Shelby the harbor seal a hug.

It’s such a heartwarming sight to the guests watching a seal training session. An Aquarium of the Pacific trainer is sitting next to a seal giving the animal a hug while it places one of its flippers on the trainer’s lap. This trained behavior may look cute but it serves an important purpose in caring for our pinnipeds.

One of the behaviors that I am currently training one of our female harbor seals, Shelby, is a tactile behavior that I refer to as “Hugging a Seal”. In this behavior I place her on a rock and then sit down next to her, placing one of her flippers on my lap while placing one of my arms around her body. Its sounds like a simple thing to do but in reality it takes a lot of trust and training between trainer and animal to accomplish. Shelby is one of the original Opening Day seals and she and I go way back. Over the years we’ve built up a lot of trust. In the early days we used to keep the seals focused on a target pole while we did tactile behaviors with them. Last year I began working with both of our female seals, Ellie and Shelby, to be able to do tactile behaviors without the need of them keeping their noses on a target pole. This led eventually to the hug a seal behavior that some guests see during Saturday presentations. This behavior actually is meant to be used as a husbandry tool by a trainer to carefully handle and inspect the body of a seal without putting any undue stress on the critter.

With my long relationship with Shelby, it didn’t take long to fine tune this behavior after which I started to have other staffers give her a hug. This allowed the seal to get used to different people next to her. As an added benefit, it also allows for some cute photos to be taken. I guess you can call them seal huggers.