Rats C To B [ Upgrade ]

Alexander had finally weeded out the behaviors and bred them to realize their potential, no longer were they afraid of him. On top of that, they still had genes that they had developed in the wild and now some genes that they developed with him. They were more willing to listen to him, they were quick to respond, stayed focused for longer, they were afraid of nearly nothing. It was everything he wanted, but they were still growing.

Alexander was very careful to take care of them as best as he could. Making sure to get milk from specific brood mothers full of good genes.

[105/1000]

Alexander would bottle the milk and nurse his 50 something rats, but they kept breeding. While this was good for now, he realized there would be an issue in the future and he would start working to curb that by putting them in an enclosure that restrained their living space. Right now just enough that would give them enough space to maintain living capacity for about 75 rats and an amount of food and water to match. And he just wanted to see how it would turn out, even though he had his suspicions, he always was the first one to test it out.

[209/1000]

When they got to their max capacity and some of them began to go hungry, the runts were first bullied and weakened, as they were unable to fight there way to meals. And if they tried to attack, they were attacked back and typically beaten. Regardless of fighting or not, they didn't grow as fast and were eventually cannibalized. It was interesting, and normally, Alexander would stop this, but he wondered how nature would resolve this issue. After a few generations of this, the rats eventually would slow down mating until there were on average 75 rats at any given time.

[310/1000]

Now that Alexander was happy with the results, for the most part they were friendly, except under dire circumstances. But most importantly he knew what could happen and knowing someones potential and propensity for certain behaviors was quite important in teaching a beast how to behave. Now he would begin training them as if they were dogs, but not in a negative, but an objective one, especially now that he bred out some of they more natural prey instincts from them, techniques that were used to create warhorses, but now he was the proud owner of an army of war rats.

[411/1500]

He freed one of his pet war rats out of their cage, and had skipped their last meal, so it was quite eager for its last bite of food. This would make training easier, as there would be above average motivation. And while ideally, he would be training the entire swarm simultaneously, he was quite fond of taking baby steps and then reinforcing behaviors through slightly more difficult steps. So in a macro scale, having so many mice responding to one source of stimuli, would not have the best reaction, and on a natural instinct to compete for food and many other factors.

[514]

With the single rat, he would start the training session.He began by bringing a tiny cube of cheese out, clicking his tongue and then proceeding to feed the rat. After repeating this for a while, the rat began to recognize the clicks were associated with food, and he would then click and put a pause between the reward, and kept increasing the delay between the two associations, which eventually lead to a peaceful manner of training instead of instinctively seeking food at the very moment it was presented. This was the foundation to lay down actual training with time for work and rewards.

[617]

Alexander would only be able to train about 15 rats a day in this manner, and he began color coding their tails with a little elastic on their tails, but not essentially to identify them specifically, but a color in different hues to signify how good they were reacting to keep track of favorable breeding features, such as focus, size, and etc.

After five days he had managed to get the concept through all of them, and then started to get the basics going. He began asking them to do things for the food, first it was a simple stay or a sit.

[720]

And it would take another five days for those basics, because it was only suitable to get efficient training around meal times. Then he started introducing targetting so he could begin 'luring' them into certain positions and then combining that with shaping to confirm the actual actions of a trick. Which is how he planned to teach most of the tricks to his new pets, but there was also one other things that would be useful to him, albeit not frequent and it would be hard to teach several rats, but it was capturing, which was essentially WAITING for the rat to perform it on its own. But he hadn't quite found a  purpose for it but he did teach him to scratch their ears on command, just to test it out, which was the cutest thing. EVER.

He continued to work on the rats by teaching them in groups and he began starting some of the basic techniques he thought would be useful for him. He made them line up in a small phalanx position, and he stepped onto them. The idea is he could have a mobile platform if he ever needed to move or take a break, but then it came to him, he could use this on the ocean to have a floating raft at sea, so he could fight, which simultaneously taught them how to fish. He filled a small pool and brought the rats with him, and retaught them the trick but in the water. Every knew stimulus, lead to teaching the tricks and abilities over again, but now they were in the water, and he stepped on them, and they paddled with their feet and tails... "Perfect."

[1000+]