In this episode of “YOU be the Behavior Consultant,” I take a hard look at how animal training practices in zoos and wildlife facilities have evolved over the last couple of decades—and how my own training has changed right along with them. I share video examples of “old Barbara” strategies (like leaning heavily on extinction, differential reinforcement, and a strict positive-reinforcement-only mindset) and compare them to what I do now when I see fear, avoidance, or aggression. My focus today is much more constructional: building repertoires and expanding an animal’s options, instead of trying to suppress behavior and hoping it goes away. A big theme is learning to recognize the actual contingencies in front of us. That means acknowledging both positive and negative reinforcement when they’re relevant, and using functional assessment instead of recipe-style, hierarchical frameworks. I show what happens when we superimpose positive reinforcement over an active negative reinforcement contingency (you’ll see it in my older parrot and cassowary footage), and how much cleaner and more compassionate training can look when we address escape/avoidance first (like my macaw working around a scary scale, or the owl example using approach/retreat with a mirror). I also talk about moving away from “motivation” as a vague explanation—especially the old obsession with weighing animals to predict training success—and toward identifying potent, functional outcomes. Sometimes it’s food, sometimes it’s distance, sometimes it’s attention (like the palm nut vulture), but the point is the same: let the animal’s behavior tell you what matters, and build from there.