Training Tuesday - Using Shaping to Teach a Novel Skill

I love teaching my dogs how to do new things, even if the things that I'm teaching are not particularly useful. The ability to communicate with them to "explain" what I want them to do is what excites me.

The most fun and most effective way to do that is with a clicker. I've trained both of my dogs to understand that a "click" from the clicker means that they are doing something right. The click happens exactly when they do the correct thing, and a treat always follows.

I taught both dogs to "take a bow" using clicker training.

There's a technique with a clicker called "shaping". Basically, you have your dog stand in front of you, and you use a click to tell them that they are "getting warmer", meaning that they are getting closer to doing what you want them to do. If they try something and I don't click, it means that they're "getting colder". It's really a lot like the child's game of warmer and colder.

I do this with both dogs. I've done it less with R than with Shyla so he tries every little step on the way to a task. That makes him a great first example for this technique. Please notice that there is absolutely no punishment or negativity to this technique. You reward when the dog does something good, and you are silent when he goes astray.

In this example, you'll notice an antenna with a red bulb on top of it on the floor. My goal is to get R to touch the red bulb with his nose. I don't want him to have to make any great leaps of logic so I start by clicking when he even vaguely looks toward it or goes near it. Later, after he is getting the idea, I start by clicking just one step directly toward it. Eventually, he is reliably touching it with his nose - after 1 minute and 22 seconds of shaping (I didn't edit the video at all!). Here's the Youtube link, if it doesn't work here.

Note that when I wrote "missed it" on the screen, it was a moment when I should have clicked but wasn't fast enough.

Obviously, this task was not even vaguely an important behavior everyday life. I love practicing the "shaping" technique with unimportant tasks because I have no emotional stake in whether they get it right or not. If I mess up the training process, there are no long term consequences in terms of their behavior.

With this technique in my arsenal, I can teach them all sorts of important things. An example is that I've trained Shyla to pick up things that I drop and put them in my outstretched hand. This helps me immensely when my spine is hurting a lot.

I love positive training of dogs - it's fun for me and for the dogs because there's no negativity involved!