Now that we had a good insight into the training of the elephants yesterday, we began with some more work on the ground with the three older elephants. At last things were looking really good. Occasionally I had to intervene but mostly the mahouts showed they had learned things the previous day. This workshop was their first introduction to positive reinforcement and I was very impressed how they already saw its potential. Everything today was so much better than yesterday and the elephants were now staying still more or less, and were picking up objects on command. The elephant that didn’t like the stick was cajoled into taking it by using a combination of tasty grass wrapped around the stick. I love to see this kind of ingenuity in the mahouts as it shows they are thinking creatively about how to set up the responses they are looking for.