The Dog Rules by Kyra Sundance

Author:Kyra Sundance
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A few movie-dog trainers have successfully used the capturing method to train dogs to yawn on cue. The only way to teach a yawn is for a patient, patient trainer to wait for the dog to yawn and to capture it. Some trainers have told me they try to elicit the yawn using mimicry and yawning themselves, but the evidence is a little sketchy as to whether this helps. Other trainers have fallen asleep in the process.

Shaping

Suppose you are waiting to capture a behavior and it never happens. Suppose it’s a behavior that you can’t teach with luring, modeling, or mimicry—perhaps a behavior such as teaching your dog to roll a soccer ball into a net. When none of the other methods will work, you can always rely upon shaping.

Shaping is the process of building a new behavior by gradually rewarding approximations of the behavior, requiring the dog to come closer and closer to the goal. The general rule is that you reinforce any behavior that is a closer approximation of the target behavior than the behavior you last reinforced. Shaping is similar to capturing in that you don’t elicit the behavior by luring or touching the dog. You just stand back and wait to capture any behavior that looks like it is going in the right direction, and reward that. You break a behavior down into little baby steps, and start with just the most basic component of the trick. Clickers are often used in the process of shaping because they can mark behaviors very precisely.

In order to demonstrate the process of shaping in my training classes, I’ll use a clicker and the process of shaping to elicit a specific behavior from a student. I’ll first determine the behavior I want, such as “I want him to touch his belly with his right hand.” The student will then try random things: he’ll lift a leg, make a sound, lift his left hand, lift his right hand— click! “Ooh! Let me try that again,” he thinks. The student lifts his right hand again— click! He lifts it again— click! He lifts it again…nothing. I have upped the ante, and am now requiring the student to lift his arm further for a click. The student figures this out, and gets clicked. Now I up the ante again, requiring his elbow to bend. Now I require it closer to his belly, and now touching his belly. This is the process of shaping, and it has taken the student just two minutes to progress through approximations and achieve the goal behavior.

When using shaping, the trainer needs to be able to break a behavior into small-enough increments so that the dog remains consistently successful and does not become frustrated. The trainer needs good observational skills and a quick reaction time. Sometimes during this process, the trainer isn’t immediately sure if the behavior offered by the dog is going in the right direction or not. Is an arm raised above the head better than an

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