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Training Techniques - Respect Farm Animals and Wildlife

The following techniques focus on the ways to behave around, prepare for and observe farm animals and wildlife.

Food Web Game

Objective: To investigate the interconnectedness of an ecosystem
Materials: A large ball of wool or string.
Audience: 8yrs and over.
Duration: 20 to 30 mins.

Directions:
This is a game to explain how everything is connected together, it especially works well with kids. Everyone stands in a circle. You stand in the centre all you need is a ball of wool. In the centre, the first question you ask is….
• Where does all the energy in the world come from?
- The Sun, ok I am the sun.
• What makes all its food from the light of the sun? Plants (any plants) to make life easier for yourself ask the person who said plants to name a plant (tree/grass/flowers).
• What eats flowers, grass etc? When someone mentions a plant or animal then you hand them a piece of wool essentially linking them to each other, try and take answers from people on either ends to get the wool overlapping and creating a good web effect.
• Then what eats that?

And it works by passing the wool between people till you have a nice complicated and soon to be tangled web. Now in case you run into trouble such as: someone says worm - then next person pipes up a badger eats a worm and all of a sudden
nothing eats a badger!! You have two choices, you can ask what else does a badger eat, or if a badger dies does anything eat him, so there are ways and means around things. Now you have your web, if they are a good group and can remember what they are you can ask who was the tree or grass, if no one remembers just nominate someone to be it. Then use a realistic example like a school group came to this forest/field for a visit and picked loads and loads of flowers. So anyone who was a flower is to sit on the ground and bring their string with them anyone who feels a pull on this string must also sit down because that means that what they eat or what eats them is gone so they in turn will not survive. Eventually everyone should be sitting on the floor essentially dead. It sounds long winded but it is a very good visual way to show how things are connected and that we can easily have an affect on them by one action.

Nature Guess Who

Objective: To investigate how certain animals are connected with the environment.
Materials: A set of ‘Guess Who’ cards.
Audience: Any age, two players/two teams.
Duration: 10 to 15 min (can vary).

Directions:
You need to make up two sets of 30 cards, with a picture of a plant or animal on one side and a colour on the other - 30 red/ 30 blue. You can make this a team game but you need two groups. Tell each team to lay out their cards colour side up on a table opposite the other team. Place a barrier between the two teams so they cannot see each other’s cards and tell them to turn them over. In a container place the names of the animals and plants on the cards on individual slips of paper, ask each team to choose one, the other team must guess what they have. The aim of the game is to guess the other team’s plant or animal before they guess yours. It has to be one of the 30 cards that each team has. To guess, the players must ask questions eliminating some of the cards they have to figure out which one it is. The only thing is they cannot ask questions about the appearance of the animal, they must be questions relating to what it eats, where it lives, does it use soil? Does it live in ahole, its habitat, what other animals it shares its home with, etc? The players must search for links with the plant or animals life to figure it out. Discuss afterwards how humans can disrupt those links or how through Leave No Trace they can respect the habitats more.

Smells Everywhere

Objective: To explore how an animal sees the world through the sense of smell.
Materials: A room and 10 to 15 different smells, either use strong smelling substances like cut grass, curry, aromatherapy oils, coffee, chocolate, orange, banana, moisturiser, sun cream, insect repellent.
Audience: Any age.
Duration: 30 to 50 min.

Directions:
Before you begin you need to set out these smells, take small pieces of cloth dipped in the essence or rub it into things such as furniture (chair legs, cushions, countertop, and so on) this way the smells are there but not visible. (There is an alternative at the end if covering the the room in these smells is not an option). When the room is ready, bring in your participants, either one by one if you have a small group, or in groups of 3 or 4. Allow them 2-3 minutes to find and identify as many different smells as possible. When all the groups are finished, get them to make a list to see if they found them all. (It’s a useful idea for your own frame of reference to note down what smells you put where). Open a discussion with how easy/hard it was to sense so many smells in one area, did they feel at all confused. Explain that this is a huge part of how animals interpret their world around them, and that their sense of smell is much stronger than ours, for example a badger’s nose is 500 times stronger than a human’s. So when we leave litter or waste around they can smell it from far away, we attract them with our food and rubbish. This is how we alter their behaviour and sadly it can become dangerous for them. If there is ever
conflict between animals and humans, animals always lose. Finish the discussion with people’s personal experience, of animals being attracted to humans for food, i.e. crows at a common picnic site, seagulls on the backs of trawlers.

On Display

Objective: To teach students proper behaviour when encountering wildlife.
Materials: An outdoor setting.
Audience: All ages. Groups of any size.
Duration: 30 min to 1 hour.

Directions:
Have a few students volunteer to sit in the centre of the group. Explain to everyone that it is lunchtime and they are about to enjoy a meal from their favourite restaurant (insert the name of your local restaurant here). While this is going on, you and several accomplices should sneak around with binoculars and cameras. Get close to have your picture taken with the “feeding wildlife” and maybe even get brave enough to touch them. This can be exaggerated so it really hits home just how distracting people can be to wildlife. Or alternatively carry this out at lunch time, so people can get a real sense of what it’s all about.

How Does it Feel?

Objective: To experience human events from an animals perspective.
Materials: Pictures of humans and native animals participating in different activities.
Audience: Any age. Groups of any size.
Duration: 30 min.

Directions:
This is great for an imaginative group. You need to prepare a scenario beforehand. It can be anything but it is best to keep it to a realistic situation, with native animals. Sample scenario - A family of foxes, live in a hole and are waiting for dark to go out and get food. A man is walking his large dog off the lead in the mountains (where the foxes live). A deer is foraging in the heather for food and her calf is hiding in the long grass nearby. Some campers lit a fire on the bog and although they put it out it is still burning underground. You need photos of the dog walker, of a family of foxes, of a deer eating grass and a calf in the grass. Assign a character to each person in your group, your family of foxes can be large and if you have a lot of people you can have a herd of deer as well. Do not tell the other characters who else is there and what they are doing. Set the scene for them, e.g. tell the foxes they live by a nice stream and have a warm den to sleep in, have them close their eyes and imagine what their life is like. Tell them to go on about their business as foxes. Do this with each of the characters, but you must tell the dog that he smells foxes and deer, he is so excited and runs off really fast to chase them. He runs up loudly barking at them. The wild animals should keep their eyes closed for most of this, so they can understand the feeling of fear and disorientation that real wild animals would have. Involve your fire by shouting fire, or if you have an incense you could light this so the smell of smoke floats around. The deer and the calf are separated by the fire and the dog and the owner get separated too. Allow the role play to go on for a few minutes and end it before people get bored or don’t know what to do. Join in yourself to get things moving. Afterwards discuss how people felt, being under attack by the dog and trapped by the fire, confused with the smell. Wrap up with a list of how we can prevent these impacts and what resources do we have available to us to learn about the wildlife and farm animals in an area.

Objective: To help participants understand ways in which they may be disrespectful to wildlife.
Materials: N/A.
Audience: All ages, particularly good with children. Groups of any size.
Duration: 30 min.

Directions:
First, ask students to imagine that they had a guest in their house who ate all the food, left litter on the floor and dirty dishes in the sink, walked on the carpet with dirty shoes, etc. Explain that, when we visit the countryside, we have a responsibility to treat animals’ homes with respect. Next, have your students pick their favourite wild animal. Give them each a minute or two to describe how they (the animal) would feel if it were shown disrespect by humans. Have them verbalize what that animal would say if it could speak its mind. Examples: a field mouse that had all its berries eaten, a fox that had its den destroyed. Then ask each student how humans could have behaved in a way that would have shown respect to them. Check with local wildlife authorities to learn how wildlife in your area is shown disrespect and be sure to discuss this with your participants.

Bird Watching

Objective: To demonstrate appropriate behaviour when watching wildlife.
Materials: Some large pictures of local birds with pieces of string running through them, bird ID charts/books, some binoculars.
Audience: Any age. Groups of any size.
Duration: Varies.

Directions:
Before you begin the activity you need to tie each bird to a different tree, you can decide on how difficult you want it to be by the distance from the tree. Check the the photos yourself so that you’re sure they can be seen at a good distance. To begin run through the elements of how we can disturb wildlife, the different ways, our actions, our smell, our noises, the sight of us, highlight ways to be as unobtrusive as possible. Birds that are not habituated to human activities are usually very sensitive to our actions. But there are ways to view them and learn more about them than chasing after them or trying to catch them. Hand out the binoculars, explain that this is to practice
identifying native birds from far away (it can actually be tricky). It would be better if they were real birds, but real birds don’t stay in the same place for long and this will give us a chance to get the basics before heading out into the country side. Then simply allow people to try and identify the different ones, about six birds is usually enough. Give them a few tips, tell them to look at body shape, colour, the beak, feet and so on. If you have time at the end you can go out looking for some live birds and see what you can find.

Life Cycles

Objective: To investigate at what times animals are most sensitive to humans.
Materials: A group with an imagination.
Audience: Any age. Groups of any size.
Duration: 30 to 40 min.

Directions:
Pick three or four different creatures that have life cycles with stages for example:
• Frog – egg – tadpole – frog
• Butterfly – egg – caterpillar – butterfly
• Dragonfly – egg – nymph – Dragonfly
Divide your group up into subgroups and give each subgroup a creature, they must act out its life cycle for the other groups to guess what creature they are. Give each group a few minutes to practice how they will do this, if they are not familiar with the creature talk them through its behaviour and life cycle and let them figure out how to demonstrate this. When each group is ready, allow them one at a time to come up and act out the life cycle, explain that when they have completed the life cycle the other groups will then have the chance to guess what they are. After every group has finished their acting and all of them have been guessed, sit everyone down and using the lives of the animals in the game, discuss when are animals most sensitive to human activities, time of year and life stage, breeding season, nursery areas, hatching, winter, hibernation, etc. Discuss how we can become more aware of these sensitive times, and reduce our impacts to these creatures. Make sure here to include farm animals and how we can not only impact the animals but also the farmers livelihood.