The Best Marine Animals to Train

Training marine animals always seemed of interest to a lot of people. I mean who wouldn’t want to swim with dolphins or sea lions on a daily basis? It’s not just all fun and play though. You have to care for the animal on ALL levels. You have to gain the animals trust to allow you to take care of them properly because if they do not trust, you cannot train them or care for them.  I’m not here to talk about all the nasty parts of training animals, but what I am going to talk about is the best animals to train ( in my opinion).

1. Taking the number one spot of the top 3 marine mammals to train would be Dolphins! Dolphins are really smart and energetic animals that really like to put on a show. Like I said before you can’t train them unless they trust you, you can get them to trust you by working with them every day and playing with them so they know you’re say and you won’t harm them. Watch here for a video on dolphin training:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdNWJ54bQX8  Dolphins learn their moves by hand motions, high whistles and positive reinforcement like fish, toys and play time with the trainers. For me, I love to swim so this would be perfect way to spend my day every day.

2.  Killer Whales

First off killer whales are not actually whales, they belong to the dolphin family. Training the whales would be a lot like training the dolphins except your would need a lot more fish and bigger toys for the positive reinforcement. People don’t usually don’t have a desire to train killer whales (Orcas) because one of their name killer whale and two because they have heard of a few incidences where the whale has killed their trainer. The truth is every wild animal in captivity has a chance to be aggressive and you never really know when that aggression will come out, that’s just the risk a lot of trainers are willing to take.  But enough with the bad stuff onto the fun stuff. Even though whales are huge animals they can do amazing stunts. You mostly won’t see killer whales anywhere in captivity except for sea world and a few other places, so that is where you would have to go to train them.

3. My last and final animal that I would want to train is a tie between sea lions and penguins.

The dilemma with this one is penguins aren’t really trained in an aquarium, they just do their own thing unless it’s feeding time then that is when they are under the trainer’s control. Even though they technically don’t get trained it would still be interesting to work with the penguins even though they stink. Sea lions would be another fun animal to work with because they are the most energetic out of all the animals I have listed already. They don’t do as high of jump as dolphins or whales, but they can do a lot more interesting tricks that just that. When you go to a zoo and see a little sea lion “feeding”, well that is a show to put on for people and it is also a practice session for the sea lions to keep the tricks in their head.

All these animals would be an amazing experience to train, but the bad thing about it all is it takes A LOT of work to even become a trainer. People think you don’t need a four year degree to become a trainer, but you do. You need to learn the anatomy of the animal and as a trainer you are supposed to tell if there is something wrong with your animal and to know that you have to know what all is inside its body. You can learn more about how to become a trainer and what it takes to train an animal here:  http://www.dolphinencounters.com/education-how.php