You'll probably never have to teach a panda to walk on a leash. But if any kind of animal lives in your house, trainers at the zoo have some useful lessons for you.

Modern training methods rely on a simple principle: If an action has a pleasurable consequence, the animal will repeat it. Or as animal behaviorist Emily Weiss puts it, ``If it feels good, do it again.''

So it should be easy to mold a pet's behavior -- reward it when it does what we like, and don't when it doesn't. But getting the details right can be a challenge, whether with a panda or a pup, and that's often because we don't understand what is actually rewarding to the animal.

BEYOND FOOD REWARDS

The simplest type of reward-based training involves food, and it's powerful. It works with animals that don't care about pleasing us or that we can't even safely get near. Weiss has trained a Komodo dragon to enter a crate using food.

But food is not all that's rewarding. Knowing that can help if your pet is not particularly food-motivated, but it's more important than that. If you're not aware of everything that's rewarding to an animal, you may be accidentally training it to do exactly what you don't want.

Weiss tells of the time she was trying to train a group of chimps to hold still for injections by using their favorite food reward, Jello Jigglers. But she couldn't even get to the first step: getting them to put their hands on the bars. The problem was they were using their hands for something else: throwing feces at her.

''After a month, it finally dawned on me -- what do you do when a chimp throws poop? You jump. You wipe it off,'' she said.

Once Weiss realized that watching her reaction was more rewarding to the chimps than getting a treat, the solution was simple. When humans stopped responding in an interesting way, the behavior stopped.

By the same token, if your dog jumps up on you when you come home, it may be because your reaction is rewarding. Try turning your back and not making eye contact or speaking until he stops, and the behavior may eventually disappear.

In other cases you may also need to think about how to prevent the behavior before it starts. Consider a dog that barks constantly or a zoo animal that paces up and down the same part of an exhibit.

The first step is the same: Be sure that you're not accidentally rewarding the behavior. After that, your best bet is to ''change the environment that elicits the behavior,'' says Lisa Stevens, curator of pandas and primates at the National Zoo.

This requires some observation. Keepers may notice that pacing starts at a certain time of day, for example, and find that moving the animal to a different enclosure before that time is all that's needed.

Likewise, if you figure out that your dog's barking begins when a person or dog walks by, the best solution may be restricting access to the room that faces the street or not leaving him in the yard alone.

OUTLETS IMPORTANT

Finally, like a good animal keeper, make sure your pet's lifestyle allows him to exercise his natural abilities. Part of what zoos call ''enrichment'' is providing a complex environment that allows an animal to perform its natural behaviors. A panda that can climb and search for food is less likely to pace.

''Often, behavior problems in dogs are because they're not living in an enriched environment,'' says Stevens.

A dog needs enough exercise and chances to use his brain. Both pandas and dogs, for example, enjoy the many types of puzzle feeders that are now available. Give your dog enough chances to be a dog, and he'll get into less trouble.

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