FE210 Shaping

1. Train Your Thumb

2. Train Your Eye

3. She Wants To Move It, Move It

4. Keep It Fast

5. Pick A Behavior

6. Click For Movement, Feed For Position

7. Chutes & Ladders

8. Changing Your Mind

9. Changing Your Mind Again

10. Chains

11. Zen

12. Shaping Multiple Criteria - Fronts

13. Shaping Attitude - Reactivity

14. Using Setting Factors - Bow

15. Does Luring Help? - Going Around

16. Shaping Questions From The Class

PURE SHAPING

Pure shaping is just that - shaping and nothing else. No luring, no body language - nothing at all except rewarding successive approximations. Pure shaping is wonderful in many situations.

If I had a movie or working dog who had to do different behaviours on the fly - if I came to work in the morning and the director said "we decided the dog shouldn't just lie on the bed, she should come down those stairs, peel a banana, knock over the TV, and THEN jump on the bed, can you be ready in 5 minutes?" I'd use a lot of luring because it's fast and the dog isn't going to have to remember how to knock over the TV next week. But when I got home, we'd spend 15 minutes on a pure shaping session, just to make sure my dog wasn't getting stuck on blindly following my hand around without engaging her brain.

If I had a behaviour that I wanted my dog to learn well and remember and perform well over a long period of time, I'd use pure shaping to teach it because when she's shaping, she's building that behaviour into her soul. As an example, I took my 3-year-old Syn and 10-year-old Stitch and got Brace Draft Dog titles on them. Syn has just finished getting her Draft Dog Excellent title, so doing easier behaviours as part of a team was no big deal. Stitch, however, got her Draft Dog title SEVEN YEARS ago and hasn't done any practising with it until about 10 days before the test. She remembered everything because I taught her the draft behaviours by shaping. All I had to do was remind her of what she knew.

If I had an animal that didn't want anything from me except to be left alone, I'd use pure shaping. I bought a llama once who only knew one thing - if you kick people they go away. Luring wouldn't work on her, obviously, because she'd stay as far away as she could from any human. I couldn't use food because if she could see a human she was too stressed to eat, and she CERTAINLY wouldn't take food from one! In three sessions of less than 15 minutes each I shaped her to accept handling all over her body.

So, pure shaping for teaching YOU how to shape, for teaching the dog to be shaped, to cement ideas in her head, for when the animal is not tame, and to be sure the dog stays operant and can remember to use her brain.

This week we'll start grabbing SPECIFIC behaviours with the clicker - the next step after encouraging ANY motion at all.

First, let's pick something from the dog's own repertoire. Go into the session with no preconceived ideas about what you're going to find. Sit down as you did toward the end of last week, and start clicking anything the dog gives you. Only one extra rule - do NOT click a previously-trained behaviour. If your dog has a trained clockwise spin, don't click any head motion to her right. Don't click her for sitting or downing. Start your session as you did before - clicking the very next motion after picking up the previous treat.

When you're ten clicks into the session, you'll notice that the dog is starting to repeat one particular behaviour. You may have clicked for a head bob, for a lifted tail, for feet moving backwards, for an open mouth, for a blink - but you'll have clicked four times for a left ear flick or raising her nose. And I told you not to get trapped into clicking only one behaviour, right? Now we're going to change that.

Focus on that one ear (or whatever movement the dog is repeating). Forget about the rest of the movements, just click that one ear. By the way, if your dog is doing something, like a head bob or chicken-scratching ;*D, that you don't really want her doing in the long run, feel free to ignore that behaviour and pick something else from her repertoire. If your dog already has some shaping experience, pick something she hasn't already worked on.

Let's take a look at Syn getting clicked for something her body is doing:

Note that when she lost her place after the shallow head swing, I let her flounder around a bit to find her place again. But Syn is an experienced shaping dog. She trusted me enough to keep working through the time she wasn't getting clicked. If I thought she would get frustrated and start barking, or quit, I'd have clicked that very shallow swing and built it up again from there. NEVER be afraid to back up and explain something again. You have to work where your dog IS, not where you want her to be!

Before I turned the camera on, I clicked Syn for moving either front paw backwards, for lowering her head, for standing up, for swinging her head to her right, and for swinging her head to her left.

I decided to keep clicking the head swinging left. I was lucky in this set because she forgot what she was doing twice - not something an experienced shaping dog does often, but useful for you to see her get through.

Basically, I waited her out - let her guess a few other ideas without clicking - and then clicked when she hit the one I wanted again.

Here's where the art of shaping comes in - you have to click often enough to keep your dog In The Game, and you have to NOT click often enough that she gets a little miffed and tries harder. Somewhere between "Fine! I didn't want to play this stupid game anyway!" and "Dammit! I TURNED MY HEAD! Didn't you see me? Wake up! Here, I'll do it again!" is the sweet spot you're looking for. From your point of view, it'll be right in between "I'm not paying for that. Or that. Or that." and "Wow, you blinked! Good job!"

HOMEWORK

Go ahead, start clicking! I'd recommend as many sessions a day as you want to do, but click something different each session. Some behaviours are very difficult for your dog to zero in on, and other things (possibly moving backwards) will be easy. In general, shaping a dog to move one paw and not others is a very advanced trainer AND dog behaviour. In general, shaping a dog to move paws backwards is usually fairly easy. When you find something that's difficult, you can remember it and continue to work on it if you think it might come in handy some day (maybe your dog was having trouble figuring out that you were clicking her for moving her hips to her right, which might come in handy if you're planning on teaching her a swing finish later), or you can file it away and forget about it, or you can remember to use a different method to teach it if you need it later. There's NOTHING wrong with Luring or Capturing or combinations, it's just that we're focused on Shaping right now.