RSS FeedI am dreadfully behind in blogging! March was a very exciting month and I’m eager to share the highlights with all of you. Strata and I attended ClickerExpo 2013 in Stamford, CT. This was my third ClickerExpo and every year it just gets better and better. It is such a positive experience – three hundred [...]
It’s been quite awhile since I have written about little Finch, and I get asked about him often. When I last wrote about Finch (all the way back in April!), he had just begun going for leash walks in my neighborhood. I would take him for walks at a quiet time of the afternoon, and [...]
Today’s post is a guest post from our instructor, Charles Wohr. Enjoy! Well, it’s that time of year again, when the days get shorter, the nights get colder and pretty soon the ground will get a little whiter. Do you struggle to find activities to do with your four legged pals during the winter months? [...]
For the last six weeks I have blogged about the topic of self control at Dog Savvy, my WickedLocal community blog. These blog posts and accompanying videos discuss jumping on people, climbing on furniture, and stealing food. Here’s the full list: Self control vs. imposed control for dogs: “Leave It”: ““No!” “Leave it!” “Off!” These [...]
Developing good, strong habits is hard work! My New Year’s resolution was to improve my training record keeping. I have done record keeping for many dog training courses, including Karen Pryor Academy and Susan Garrett‘s Recallers 2.o and 3.0 courses. Now I’m starting anew for her Say Yes to Contact Success course. There is so [...]
The last few weeks have been very busy for little Finch. As I mentioned in his introduction post, Finch is a case study dog for Julie Robitaille’s TACT program. Together, Julie, Dan, Finch, and I have been filming video clips for a series of presentations Julie will be giving on TACT. The first presentation was [...]
Now it is time to wrap up my series on “How to Get Behavior” with targeting! Targeting is like a hybrid between the three methods I have already explained: luring, capturing, and shaping. Here’s why. How to Target First, you must use capturing and/or shaping to teach your dog to touch or follow a target [...]
Over the last few days, I have written about shaping and luring here on Spring Forth Dog Blog. My next topic is capturing, which is a pretty simple, straightforward way to get behavior! How to Capture Simply put, capturing involves waiting for the dog to do the ENTIRE behavior you are looking for by himself [...]
Last week I started off my series on “How to Get Behavior” with shaping. Now I’m going to explain a bit about luring and how to use a lure to teach behavior. The term luring refers to the use of a desired reward to coax the dog into achieving the desired behavior. The “desired reward” [...]
When it comes to positive reinforcement based clicker training, there are four major ways of getting behavior: shaping, luring, targeting and capturing. There are other ways, including physical modeling, but they have limited applications and are rarely by most positive reinforcement trainers. In this post, I’ll address shaping, and later this month, I’ll follow-up with [...]
