Tag Archives: shaping

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Staying back in week 1

While the FE350 class moves on to week 2, Reece and Andrea are going to keep working on the basics. Once we start getting this, I think we can catch up, or at least we’ll have a better foundation.

The week 2 notes included the following tip:

When shaping a behaviour involving movement always click (mark) when the dog is in motion.  If you click when the dog is still moving, you will get continued motion. If you click when the dog stops you will get more “stopping”. In other words, the dog will think that is all the rotation you want and stop where you click.

That “clicked” exactly with some of the knowledge Sheila shared with Andrea:

If you click motion, you’ll get more motion. If you click AFTER or BEFORE the motion, you’ll get less motion.

Andrea certainly has to work on the timing of her clicking.

The class forum had a post from another person who was also having issues with the dog licking. Some of the suggestions that Donna gave the student were to try a different hand shape (open palm = lick), to keep the target hand at shoulder or lower, and to place the hand at a 45 degree angle away from the tongue.

So here is an attempt from today. The hopes for this session were: (1) clicking for motion towards the target hand before the lick can happen, and (2) use a fist as the target.

Back to basics: nose touch shaping

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Learning new things

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