"Shaping" is simply the process of breaking a behavior down to its smallest components and slowly raising your criteria in order to build new behaviors. By reinforcing successive approximations, it's possible to train dogs to do almost anything they are physically capable of doing! In this episode, Annie goes over some key things to think when shaping a new behavior, and describes how to shape a dog to go to a mat, or what she calls a "sticky spot." A dog who knows how to go to a mat will make an excellent guest at holiday dinners: You can "shape" a pup to have a specific spot where he will have learned to stay put and be calm, no matter how good that stuffing smells!



Notes: School For The Dogs training mat - Don't Shoot The Dog - Karen Pryor's Ten Laws of Shaping - Fun Dog Fact Of The Day: Karen Pryor's Nursing Your Baby - Woof Shout Out - Share your shaping session with us by tagging @SchoolForTheDogs on Instagram or sharing at Facebook.com/groups/schoolforthedogs. Like this podcast! Please rate us five stars on iTunes!

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

Hey everyone. So today I wanted to talk about a concept that is really crucial to dog training, but also something that is going to help you with a practical training exercise that you can start working on in preparation for Thanksgiving, which is a time when I think it's a good idea to show off how well your dog is trained to your family and friends. And, of course, that can be challenging because you're often in new places, there's food involved,  there's a lot of commotion. But by playing this little shaping game that I am going to describe over the next week or so, I think that you are going to be able to really demonstrate how savvy your dog is at understanding what you want and just being an overall polite little buddy.

Shaping is simply the process of breaking a behavior down to its absolute smallest parts and then positively reinforcing the behavior, raising your criteria at incremental steps. Now, the real trick to shaping is to never raise your criteria too quickly, which means there's kind of an art to shaping I think. And that's an art of really knowing the student you're working with, in this case, a dog so that you can make things harder only at a rate that they're going to be able to still figure out what it is you want. If you make things too hard, too fast, you get an animal who I call it “dropping out of school,” you get an animal who's just like, well, I can't do this, nevermind, goodbye. Now of course, shaping is happening all the time.



And certainly school, a human school is a place where we all experience shaping. You start out at school and the criteria is very low. You show up and you do a crayon drawing and no matter how bad it is, everybody's clapping their hands and you put two blocks together and announced that that's the number two. And your teachers and parents will think you're a genius but of course pretty quickly, the criteria of what's expected of you is raised. And by the time you're in high school, you're doing algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and you didn't get there  in a single leap from your days playing with blocks. The criteria was raised slowly over time with your teachers, step-by-step, raising the bar as far as what was expected of you.



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