Shaping is a concept that many pet owners find hard to grasp. We're used to making animals do things by leading them or pushing them into the behavior we want—and it is hard to believe that there is another way. Common sense tells us that there is no possible way to get an animal to do something it has never done before, doing nothing yourself but reinforcing spontaneous movements.
Karen's Letters
Advanced Trainers Find Depth at ClickerExpo
By Karen Pryor on 03/13/2007Every year at ClickerExpo we save a few spaces for special guests: distinguished trainers, scientists, or leaders in other fields. This year one of our honored guests was Sue Ailsby, a very well known clicker trainer and teacher from Canada. I'd like to share with you one of Sue's posts to the ClickerExpo list after ClickerExpo Los Angeles.
Why I Hate the Long Down
By Karen Pryor on 02/13/2007When I first took a dog to obedience class, back in the Pleistocene, we were given six weeks to teach our dog to obey five basic commands: sit, down, stay, heel, and come. The behaviors were a given: these are the things any well-trained, obedient dog should be able to do. The important thing was not just doing the behavior, but Obeying the Command No Matter What. Perhaps the most important of all the behaviors, and the most difficult, was the long down. Could your dog lie down and stay down while you walked away? Could he stay there until you came back and told him he could get up? What if his mortal enemy was next to him, or the instructor walked behind him, or some other dog got up and came over to him? Never mind! He'd better not budge! If he moved, we screamed, "No! Down!" and rushed back and jerked him into position again.
Animal Lovers' Holiday
By Karen Pryor on 01/08/2007Sure, ClickerExpo is all about training. But plenty of people come who aren't trainers. Some of them have some other professional reason to come; they're veterinarians, or manufacturers, or journalists. Some people are just there because their Significant Other wanted to come; or, like one teenager I met last year, because they were brought along to babysit a litter of puppies in the hotel room.
Reinforce Every Behavior?
By Karen Pryor on 12/01/2006In September I gave a workshop at the annual meeting of the Association for Pet Dog Trainers, always both an honor and a pleasure. In the workshop I demonstrated an exercise I'd learned, at an earlier APDT meeting, from Massachusetts trainer Tibby Chase, for teaching inattentive dogs to walk politely at a person's side. The exercise involves targeting and shaping, and works even if neither the handler nor the dog know anything about clicker training. APDT had arranged for a pet owner to bring three friendly but largely untrained dogs. None of the dogs were accustomed to being in public, and while they were fairly quiet they were of course trying to smell everything and greet everyone, pulling on their leashes and paying very little attention to the person holding them. The owner found a volunteer handler for each dog so I could put them through the exercise, one at a time.
