Topic: Using capturing to build dog and animal behaviors.

Guests:

Nan Arthur is the author of Chill Out Fido! How To Calm Your Dog, a KPA faculty member and the owner of Beacon of Hope Dog Behavior and Training Services in San Diego, CA. Nan has 23 years of experience and works with dog professionals, shelter employees and volunteers, and pet dog owners and has developed volunteer training programs and lectures for many local shelters, ensuring that the dogs not only receive environmental enrichment, but positive training to help improve the adoptability of the dogs. Nan holds memberships in PPG, and APDT, IAABC, KPACTP, studies Improvisational techniques and also a certified DogSafe First Aid Instructor and an instructor with DogTec’s Dog Walking Academy.

 

 

 

Cassie Pestana is a certified professional dog trainer through the Karen Pryor Academy and Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers. Prior to working with dogs, Cassie had the opportunity to research the behavior of a variety of species, including rats, African Wild Dogs, elephants and vervet monkeys, while completing her bachelor’s degree in Biology from Brown University. After graduating, Cassie decided to pursue dog training as a career and worked with a several different types of trainers and methods. Her heart naturally settled on a force-free practice of primarily positive reinforcement, which aligned perfectly with her knowledge of learning theory and animal behavior. In 2017 Cassie opened Cassie’s Dog Training in Orange County, CA with the goal of enhancing communication and understanding between owners and their dogs. Since then she has worked with hundreds of dogs and puppies both in the home and in group class settings. It is her goal to one day open her own training facility in order to further spread the knowledge of force-free training methods.

 

Show Transcript:

Intro: You’re listening to how do you train that the place for advice and encouragement for people interested in learning more about positive reinforcement training. You can interact with us on our Facebook page, How Do You Train That?, leave some questions and comments, and we will put those topics into our feature podcasts. So put your feet up and let’s get started.

Kat: And we’ve got Nan and Cassie. So today we’re talking about using capturing. And I think we’re gonna need to define what capturing is. So, Nan, can you maybe give me a definition of what capturing is?

Nan: Sure. I think that the easiest way to explain it is to be able to capture, in a moment in time, with some sort of a marker. We typically use clippers that says that the dog has done a behavior we like in. That’s usually when we’re capturing innate behaviors dogs do anyway. So like sit and down and looking up at you. Those are really easy things to capture and then pretty soon once you’ve done it enough times with reps and the reinforcement history gets stronger than you add accu- to it like sit or down and the dog will be able to perform in a very short period of time in terms of that behavior with the cue that you’ve added to it has that. How’s that?

Kat: That’s great. Cassie? Would you like to add anything to that definition?

Cassie: No. I think that that definition was great. It’s just marking that behavior the second happens behaviors they already do that we don’t really think to reinforce, but there’s not much kick-starting it. There’s not a cue when you’re first starting out.

Kat: Right. So the the behavior is basically fully formed as it will eventually be. We’re not shaping. We’re not building. It’s just the dog does this thing. And we’re capturing this thing is that. Is that right?