We are taking “FE350: Body Awareness through Targeting” through Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Donna Hill is the instructor for this session. We will post our homework here for us to track our progress and for you to review. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

The first lessons are basic shaping and targeting skills. (Karen Pryor article on The Ten Laws of Shaping.) Andrea’s work is to come up with small steps of criteria to be completed (create a shaping plan), and to consistently hold a couple of sets of short training sessions each day.

One neat idea from the lesson on cues. To help come up with consistent and definitive hand gestures to indicate a behaviour, consider using American Sign Language. For example, see lifeprint.com, where you can type in a behavior in the search function to get ideas of hand signals to use. The lesson notes that cues shouldn’t be introduced too early – it’s better to wait until a dog clearly understands what is required before trying to pair that behaviour with a cue (verbal or hand signal).

So stay tuned. We’ll post our first week’s homework here soon!

— Reece