Over the past few months, since I adopted a border collie puppy Trieu, I have learned a lot about capturing and shaping behaviors, especially when we are working on verbal and gestured commands.
Capturing is basically rewarding your dog whenever they are doing a desired behavior without your guidance. A basic example is rewarding your dog whenever they decide to sit or lie down. A more complicated concept to teach but one that I have been persistent on is having Trieu settle down. Basically having my puppy take a short break before resuming anything. This is an important skill that my dog needs to learn as she comes from a long line of energetic dogs. I would wait for any moment when it looks like Trieu settling down, then I would reward her for doing a great job of settling down and I’ll keep up the rewards each time she continues to stay in a settle position. Capturing wanted behavior with dog is an important thing to be doing as it teaches them what behaviors are appropriate given the situation. Plus they get even more treats this way!
Shaping behaviors, on the other hand, is improving on the capturing method, and really honing down on a specific action until you get the desired behavior for your dog. Let’s use fetch as example. Fetch is a fun game that is really enjoyable with doggy companions but is a concept that needs to be broken down into steps. First, we would need to make sure that our dog is really interested in the toy, then we need to make sure that they will get the toy and hold on to it while they run straight back to you. Initially, if you are getting an early fetch game going, your dog may not instantly run back at you. So, to get her attention, I would be as goofy as I can when she has grabbed the toy, that way she will likely run back to me to investigate my weirdness! Over time, she will start to understand, that the game is only fun when she has brought the toy back to me.
Spending time to improve our communication with our dogs is such a fun and rewarding experience for both our dogs and us! With these techniques, we can end up with some pretty cool interactions!
