When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [17]
As you can see, even a simple behavior like picking up a ball is actually a series of many small behaviors. Your fun challenge as a trainer is to learn to recognize and reinforce each little step until you build the finished behavior.
Piggy Pointer
It might really only take a couple of approximations to get your dog to do a behavior, depending on the dog and the behavior you are trying to teach. As you become more experienced, however, you will find that the more approximations you reinforce, the better and faster your dog will learn, remember, and perform the behavior.
It is very important that you do not prompt, lure, or, compel/guide your dog to do anything. Your dog is going to learn to offer to do things for you without you asking. Offering to do things is not something that comes naturally to most Pigs Fly dogs, but you can teach it. The first exercise we will do is to get your dog hip to the rules of the game—he does all the work and you let him know when he has it right.
Shaping without prompting/luring/compelling your dog to do anything (also called “free shaping”) is central to the Pigs Fly system. Your dog needs a work ethic, and this is going to teach him to have one. You just can’t train a dog that does not want to try. Remember, your dog is the one who excelled at independent problem solving. The “Pigs Fly” breeds learned more quickly than the “easy to train” Sheltie when they were not told what to do, but had to figure it out by themselves. If you push on your dog’s butt to get him to sit, lure him around with a piece of food, or jerk on his collar to get him to stop pulling, you are not using his natural way of thinking to your advantage. Sure, you might get him to do what you want him to do, but it will be a long, cold, slog up a very steep hill. By free shaping him to do things, you can take your “who cares?” dog and make him as crazy to do things for you as a Border Collie. Don’t believe me? Let’s give it a try!
Pig-tionary
Free Shaping: Training behaviors by rewarding small approximations of those behaviors without the use of luring or prompting. B.F. Skinner coined the term “shaping” in connection with his work on laboratory rats. Dog trainer Deb Jones, PhD, expanded the term to “free shaping” to emphasize the absence of prompting, luring, or compulsion.
The focus of this first lesson is on you and your ability to pick out and take a picture of a behavior with a clicker. The Pigs Fly training system deliberately begins with playing games rather than training “useful” behaviors so that you can concentrate on your mechanical training skills and your dog can concentrate on becoming operant. Actual training behaviors you will use, like sit, come, and down, will come later. First you must take that most crucial step on which 90% of dog training success depends: creating a dog who wants to work. If you begin by training “useful” behaviors, you are likely to get caught up in “getting it right” and the sessions will not be as free or mentally productive for you and your dog. Our goal by the end of this lesson is that:
1. You will be fluent enough with the clicker that you will be able to mark the desired behavior with some accuracy, and;
2. You dog will have opened up and started to offer behaviors continuously.
Don’t be discouraged if you find it hard at first to coordinate your clicking with the exact behavior you want to mark. Everyone starts out a little clumsy—remember my friend who kept trying to click the food and feed the clicker to her dog! You will get the hang of it, I promise. You will get better and