• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

If you are only luring your dog, the likelihood of your dog performing any particular action is a simple calculation of how much he likes the thing you are offering, versus how difficult or unpleasant the behavior you’re asking for is. Furthermore, when you are luring your dog around with a cookie, all your dog sees is that cookie. He probably has no idea whatsoever what the rest of his body is doing. So long as his mouth is oriented towards the cookie, he thinks he is in good shape. If your dog does not like cookies or toys that much, you are out of luck. It is inevitable that, many times, the reward you present will not be interesting enough for your dog to perform the desired behavior. This is especially true when you take your dog out in public. What is a piece of hot dog compared to the excitement, smell, and novelty of the entire world?

So, how do you find a reinforcer that is more exciting than anything else in the world that your dog could possibly encounter? There is no food or toy that will ever be that valuable, but the hunt for the behavior that will make the click go off can be more engaging for a dog than anything else. If you take the trouble to create excitement for the learning process through free shaping games, even a mundane reward becomes very valuable to your dog, and rewards that he really likes become very intense reinforcers.

Here is a human example that may help you understand how an exciting process can be more important than an actual goal. When you were a kid did you ever do Easter egg or treasure hunts? Do you remember how exciting they were, how pandemonium would break out when the kids were released on the hunt? Let’s face it, there was never any prize on that hunt that was that great, or that the kids had not had before. None of the prizes on the hunts were things that kids were that excited about in an everyday setting, but in the context of a hunt, those children went wild to find the fairly ordinary stuff that the adults had hidden. That is the extra power that you get from free shaping—you leverage your reinforcers so that (eventually) there is nothing in the world that can trump the possibility of a training session with you.

As you start free shaping behaviors with your dog, you will see them become very excited and intensely focused on the problem at hand. The dog does not know what the answer to the problem is, but as he throws out each behavior, there is an anticipation and hope that this might be the behavior that pays. The animation that a free shaped dog displays when problem solving is very intense and can only be compared to a dog excitedly following a scent trail or foraging for food. Your dog actually is hunting for the answer that will lead to the click. Free shaping behaviors can turn even the most dud-like, scatterbrained, or just plain oblivious dog into a training maniac.

Now, let’s go back to the example of luring a dog to sit. Yes, you can get the behavior much more quickly if you lure the dog into position, and your dog will even develop some excitement at the prospect of training because there is food involved, but it is no where near the intensity that free shaping behaviors will bring. Pigs Fly dogs need to be conditioned to get excited about training, and free shaping is a great way to do it.

Don’t be discouraged if free shaping behaviors seem difficult at first. After you free shape the first couple of behaviors, all the others will be incredibly easy. You will be astounded at how quickly you learn to tune into the minutest movements of your dog and how well you learn to parse down behaviors into the tiniest approximations. Ultimately, I want you to free shape as many behaviors as possible, but if you are having trouble getting a behavior and want to throw in a little lure, no one is going to die. You need to make the training process fun for you as well as your dog, and you need to have success in order to have fun. As you go along in your training and get comfortable with the clicker