14 NovEpisode 33 | How to shape your dog to go to a mat (and to be a polite Thanksgiving guest)
"Shaping" is simply the process of breaking a behavior down to its smallest components and slowly raising your criteria in order to build new behaviors. By reinforcing successive approximations, it's possible to train dogs to do almost anything they are physically capable of doing! In this episode, Annie goes over some key things to think when shaping a new behavior, and describes how to shape a dog to go to a mat, or what she calls a "sticky spot." A dog who knows how to go to a mat will make an excellent guest at holiday dinners: You can "shape" a pup to have a specific spot where he will have learned to stay put and be calm, no matter how good that stuffing smells!
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Transcript:
Annie:
Hey everyone. So today I wanted to talk about a concept that is really crucial to dog training, but also something that is going to help you with a practical training exercise that you can start working on in preparation for Thanksgiving, which is a time when I think it's a good idea to show off how well your dog is trained to your family and friends. And, of course, that can be challenging because you're often in new places, there's food involved, there's a lot of commotion. But by playing this little shaping game that I am going to describe over the next week or so, I think that you are going to be able to really demonstrate how savvy your dog is at understanding what you want and just being an overall polite little buddy.
Shaping is simply the process of breaking a behavior down to its absolute smallest parts and then positively reinforcing the behavior, raising your criteria at incremental steps. Now, the real trick to shaping is to never raise your criteria too quickly, which means there's kind of an art to shaping I think. And that's an art of really knowing the student you're working with, in this case, a dog so that you can make things harder only at a rate that they're going to be able to still figure out what it is you want. If you make things too hard, too fast, you get an animal who I call it “dropping out of school,” you get an animal who's just like, well, I can't do this, nevermind, goodbye. Now of course, shaping is happening all the time.
And certainly school, a human school is a place where we all experience shaping. You start out at school and the criteria is very low. You show up and you do a crayon drawing and no matter how bad it is, everybody's clapping their hands and you put two blocks together and announced that that's the number two. And your teachers and parents will think you're a genius but of course pretty quickly, the criteria of what's expected of you is raised. And by the time you're in high school, you're doing algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and you didn't get there in a single leap from your days playing with blocks. The criteria was raised slowly over time with your teachers, step-by-step, raising the bar as far as what was expected of you.
And I believe it's really the responsibility of the teacher or the trainer, when you're dealing with dogs, to raise criteria at a rate that you could handle. It's when the problems are made too difficult too soon that you get kids that say, “well, I'm just not good at math, or I just can't do this. I just don't understand this, what use is it to even try.”
Whereas if things could be just spoonfed and smaller amounts, often you will see success might be a little bit slower, but you'll still see success. And this is definitely something I see in dogs all the time during different shaping exercises that they do this, like I said, I call it dropping out of school. And with a kid, you know, you can kind of coerce them into continuing, you know, you have to take this test or else you have to reach this level of competency or else. With dogs, I find it much more interesting to put the challenge on the trainer in forcing him or her to really flex the muscles required in order to cater the teaching process to the dog to make sure the dog is set up to succeed at really every level. And often that means making something a little harder. Seeing if the dog can figure out what you want and if not, taking it back a few notches to a point where the dog can succeed.
I kind of think of shaping as like constantly refining something and, you know, often at School for the Dogs when people call up and say, “well, I want to take a class with my dog, but my dog already knows how to sit. My dog already knows to lie down.” You know, all of us kind of giggle to each other about people saying something like that because shaping is this constant process and there's always the possibility to shape a dog who already knows one thing into a dog who has the ability to do that behavior in some different possibly better, greater way.
So for instance, sure, maybe your dog knows how to sit, but does he know how to sit if you ask in a whisper? Does he know how to sit if you're jumping up and down on one leg? Does he know how to sit if someone else asks? Does he know how to sit for two minutes at a time? Does he know how to sit in Grand Central Station? Does he know how to sit within one second of you asking? Sitting is not just a single thing. And using smart shaping, you can refine the behavior in each of the ways that I was just mentioning. You can make the behavior have a longer duration. You can make the speed at which the behavior happens faster. You can shape your dog to understand different cues.
So even basic behaviors are constantly being shaped. But shaping is usually the thing that you credit when you're teaching something sort of fancier and flashier to a dog, be it getting them to play dead or open the refrigerator or push an elevator button.
These are behaviors that we can't necessarily capture. Capturing being what we're doing when a dog does something we like and we click or use some kind of verbal marker to pinpoint the moment and say, “yes, that is the thing that I liked.” When you're capturing, in the beginning at least, you're usually waiting for something a dog is accustomed to doing anyway, just under very normal circumstances. So it's usually not hard to capture a sit or capture a dog lying down because these are things that dogs just do. Um, but when you are working at shaping behavior, you're usually gonna start out capturing, just capturing, whatever a dog is doing on his or her own and then sort of holding back and waiting to see if the dog tries something slightly different, ideally along the lines of whatever it is you're looking for. And then you're going to capture that behavior. And in doing so, you've now sort of raised the criteria.
There's different kinds of shaping. There's what's called free shaping, which is a lot of fun, which is kind of just like waiting for the dog to do something creative on his or her own and capturing that. One example of free shaping as the game, I think it's called 101 things you can do with a box. I'll link to something about this in the show notes. But with free shaping, you might not have a specific goal in mind, you are just kind of on the ride with your dog figuring out what you can reward that's new and different. I find the more you do shaping with a dog, whether it's a free shaping game or something more structured, really the better they get at learning and the better they get at figuring out, “Oh, I need to try something new.”
And actually my dog Amos with whom I've done a lot of shaping and he loves training, he kind of hilariously will just start nosing and prying at whatever's around him when he wants something. At one point, I had a roommate who played guitar and she had all kinds of guitar pedals in her room. And one day she told me that he came into the room and just started pressing all the pedals because it was around dinner time, even though he'd never been taught to press pedals, I think he just has this idea of sometimes when I try new things something works and the humans give me what I want. So a dog who is savvy at shaping, I very much believe is a dog who can just sort of become a better learner, better at figuring out what it is that is needed to meet his needs.
So the very first exercise that I like to teach when I'm demonstrating shaping to anyone, with any dog, is teaching a dog to go to a mat. And this is the exercise that I think will help you impress your friends this Thanksgiving. So you can use a beach towel, you can use a yoga mat, you could even use, like, a dish towel if you have a smaller dog, but when in doubt, for this exercise, I would start out with something larger rather than smaller, something ideally that you will be able to either fold or cut into smaller and smaller pieces to the point where it's just about the same size as your dog. At School for the Dogs, we used yoga mats that we cut into smaller bits, usually we use one that's about a one third or a quarter of the size of a regular sized yoga mat.
You could also shape your dog to go to a bed using the same steps I'm going to talk about right now. But I would prefer if you use something flat rather than anything that your dog is going to have to jump into at all. You want something that your dog is just simply going to be able to step on.
So very first thing, what you're going to do is sprinkle some treats onto your mat and just let your dog enjoy them.
Now again, to go back to the human school analogy. You know. when you first start out at school, and you maybe have heard me use this analogy before of the crayon drawing. Like I was saying earlier, you go to school, you do a crayon drawing, you go home and you show that crane crayon drawing to your parents and they might as well have their eyes closed and they're still gonna say like, “amazing job. You're so great.” Right? Cause they just want you to like drawing and to like being at school and the actual talent that you're displaying at that point is unimportant because it's really just about classical conditioning at that point. It's about creating good feelings, good associations. The criteria of your behavior is zero. And that's what we're going for when we're just sprinkling yummy things on the mat. We're at criteria zero. We just want your dog to be like, “Hey, this mat's kind of a cool place. I like being there.” And throughout this exercise you can always go back to this step.
And actually Karen Pryor who outlined some 30 years ago, the 10 laws of shaping which trainers still reference all the time and I will definitely link to them in the show notes. One of her phrases that she coined in these steps is “going back to kindergarten.” And I love that phrase for the reason that I love my crayon drawing analogy in that, you know, you can always go back, you can always make things easier. I was at a conference once and someone played an old radio interview. I think it was an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air of Ray Charles. Andthe interviewer asked him,”what do you play when you're not performing, when you're home alone?” And he said, “scales.” He practices scales, right? Talk about going back to kindergarten. You have this fabulous pianist. And he was just always working at kind of improving things at that very, very basic level. And I think it's a good thing to keep in mind that there is never any shame in going back to basics.
And I point out all the time to, to dog owners, I could teach your dog to sit all over again at any moment of any day. And it's only going to help the end behavior to start at the beginning. And I'm jumping around a little bit, but when you practice this shaping exercise with the mat, which I'm going to talk about more, sorry, I went a little bit off track, but when you're practicing this exercise with the mat start from the beginning every time you practice it. That's my suggestion. So even if you, even if it feels silly, every time you're adding any kind of…anything different to the situation, whether that means practicing in a new room or practicing at a different time of day or practicing with a new person, all of those things are bits of criteria that are actually making things harder. Because to a dog practicing a behavior in a new room might as well be a totally new ask.
So, uh, it is always wise to go back to kindergarten whenever you're teaching anything new, whether you're focusing on plain capturing or incrementally making things, capturing things that are more difficult with shaping. Never be afraid to go back to kindergarten.
So, okay, you have your mat out, you're letting your dog eat some yummy things off of it. Now what I would like you to do is give your dog a treat just a couple feet from the mat. So picture you're sitting, you have maybe the mat laid out in front of you and then maybe two feet in front of that, a foot in front of that, you're just going to toss a treat for your dog to go get. And you don't want to make it too hard for your dog to find this treat. You might put a bowl down or a placemat down or something where you can toss the treat so your dog can find it right away. We don't want your dog to waste time going on any kind of search. This is just at this point about resetting your dog.
Next what you're going to do is just wait patiently and I bet because your dog has just eaten a whole bunch of yummy things from the mat, your dog is going to walk back to the mat, or if not walking back to the mat, your dog is probably gonna come walk back towards you because he has lots of associations with you giving him good things through the years, I'm sure. And you're going to use a marker to pinpoint the moment your dog puts even one toe on that mat.
If you haven't listened to this podcast before, I suggest going back and listening to the Dog Training Triad series of episodes, specifically the one on timing, which I believe is the third in that series. But it’s in that episode where I talk about using a clicker and a clicker is simply a way to pinpoint a moment that your dog is doing whatever it is you want him to do. It is a faster way of communicating to your dog that you liked what he did rather than trying to get a treat or give him some sort of reward other than a treat in the exact moment that he does whatever you like. The clicker acts as a kind of stand in and the very first step of using the clicker is making sure that your dog understands every time he hears that clicking noise, it's followed by something good. Whether that be a small treat, a game, a good head rub, affection, whatever. But the clicker always has to be followed by something really awesome.
And you don't have to use a clicker. If you don't use a clicker, you can use a word like “yes,” or sometimes people will use a whistle, but really whatever you're using, it's just a bridge that's both giving specificity to the moment your dog does what you want him to do and also buying you a moment of time so that you can give whatever the thing is.
And also another nice thing about using a marker, like a clicker, especially or also a word, but especially something that's kind of neutral like a clicker, is that there's not meaning behind it like there is when we use our voice, right? Dogs are always trying to figure out what we mean by things. And I think often they're, they're reading tones in her voice that we probably don't even know that we're using. Also, my, you know, “good boy” doesn't sound the same as your “good boy” or my husband's “good boy,” so a clicker is kind of nice in that it's just like a steady, stable sound that doesn't change and as the same with whoever uses it. But all of that said, I use the word “yes” a lot as a marker just because I don't always have a clicker handy and I find it tends to work pretty well.
One important thing to remember when you're using a clicker is you want to make sure that you click or say your word like “yes” before you present whatever your reinforcer is going to be. And for this exercise I definitely suggest using a treat as a reinforcer, specifically something that's not going to be very crumbly and something that you can toss. Like I was talking about, cause you're going to be tossing it to reset your dog. You're going to toss it into that plate or onto the placemat or whatever it is, that's just a little bit farther from you, a foot or two farther away than the mat.
So you are going to click when your dog's toe hits your mat and then then you have a choice. And this is trainer's choice. Either you can keep putting the treat on the mat to help reinforce the association or of the mat being a good place to be or you can speed things up by using the treat reset the dog by tossing that treat into the plate that's just North of where you have the mat. And actually whether or not you give that sort of bonus treat on the mat that, you know, awesome crayon drawing treat, let's call it, just good job criteria, zero treat. You're still gonna give a treat that you're going to toss because I really do want you to reset your dog. But the treat on the mat is optional based on I would say the interest your dog is showing in the mat. If it feels, if you feel like you still need to build the interest, if you feel like you still need to convince your dog that school is an awesome place to be, then go for it and give that sort of bonus treat.
Once you have your dog coming and touching the mat with, like, just even a little bit of one paw, I would say five or six times within a minute, you're going to start raising your criteria. And if you're struggling with us, if you feel like your dog is struggling with this, then take a break and go back and try it again later. Again, your criteria can stay the same, but if your dog seems into this game and loving it, then your criteria might now be waiting for a full paw to hit the mat rather than just a toe. And again, if your dog is having an easy time with this, skip putting the treat on the mat and just toss it.
Now I know it could be tempting to try and converse with your dog about getting him to do this behavior. It can be tempting to lure him. It can be tempting to pat the mat, to put a treat down in order to get your dog to come to it, but I suggest you sit on your hands and try and not do any of these things because as much as this is an exercise about teaching your dog to go to a mat, it's also an exercise about teaching your dog to figure things out on his own. And you will see that by having a little bit of confidence in your dog, he is going to demonstrate some problem solving here that I think will impress you.
If you have a dog who has ever used a remote treat dispenser like a Treat and Train, which is like my favorite training gadget and I will link to it in the show notes. You could even use a Treat and Train, which is like a remote, you just press a little button on a remote and it spits out a treat. You could set that up to deliver the treats for your dog so that every time your dog's paw hits the mat, you trigger the Treat and Train. And that's kind of a way to really remove yourself from the equation even more and give your dog even a little bit more confidence that he can figure this out on his own anyway. But totally optional thing to do.
So you're just going to keep raising your criteria little by little. Next, your dog's got one paw on the mat, okay, when you feel confident, when you feel like you would bet $20 bucks your dog is going to put one foot on that mat, you know, five, six times within a minute, That's the moment where you want to raise your criteria to two paws on the mat. Now, I suggest keeping your training sessions short. Often when I'm shaping, I find that I get really into it. I want to keep going when it probably would be better to give my dog a break. It's a good idea to always stop at a point of success, kind of stop while your dog is still loving it and wanting more. When I end a shaping session, I like to end with a little bit of a jackpot of a reward, maybe sort of putting five or six treats down at the very end just to,you know, sort of solidify the feelings that this is a fun game and that, you know, even though it's ending, it's still a good time. And then pick up again later again, always starting from the beginning, start at one toe, then after maybe a couple, two or three reputation, raise your criteria to one foot, etc, etcc. And of course your goal is to get all the way to having your dog get four paws on the mat.
Now once your dog is reliably getting four paws on a mat, going to the mat over and over, the training doesn't stop there, like I said, you can always be refining a behavior. And I should mention, you know, you might end up going from one toe on the mat to four feet on the mat. Some dogs skip all the steps and go straight to whatever your criteria, your end criteria was right away. And you need to be prepared for that. So don't be afraid to be reinforcing four paws on the mat when you started out with one toe right away. Just because your dog has skipped a few grades doesn't mean that training isn't going well, certainly is going well. You just want to be ready to reinforce some greater version of the behavior than what you maybe were imagining you would get to.
So once your dog is reliably going to the mat, I suggest putting the mat in new places. I suggest you being in a new place in relation to the mat. So if you've been sitting right next to the mat, try going and sitting a little bit farther from the mat or see if your dog will do it with a new person instead of you. Try in a new room. Again, always going back to kindergarten, always starting from just that, you know, one a fingernail on the mat point.
Another way you can continue to shape the behavior to a finer and finer point is to wait for your dog to sit or lie down when he gets to the mat. And if your dog doesn't seem to be getting this and is wandering off, if your dog has a really good sit or down cue, you certainly can give that cue as soon as he gets to the mat and then click when he performs either the sit or the down. This is actually called chaining behaviors. So you're kind of rewarding the behavior of going to the mat by giving this cue that should be a nice opportunity to do something he already knows how to do. And then clicking and treating when he… or saying “yes” and treating when he does that sit or down. And you'll find if you do this just a few times, chances are your dog will start to automatically sit or lie down when he goes to the mat, which is a really the goal. Especially because what I'm going to want you to do is start bringing this mat to new places and rewarding your dog for lying down calmly on that mat.
So the reason that I love having a mat at events, especially where there's food or like when I'm dining out with my dog is because it's just such a great way to be able to very specifically reward for doing something good. What's good? Being on the mat. Right? I just want you to be on this space, on this spot. It's kind of like teaching “stay” just with specific parameters. I think of it like you're teaching your dog to go to a sticky spot rather than the sort of amorphous, I want you to be in one one place and stay still, which is kind of what we're teaching when we're teaching “stay” This is a very specific space where I want you to be.
Now another thing that you can do as you start to raise your criteria higher and higher as your dog gets better and better at this shaping to go to a mat is to make the mat smaller. It's great if you can work up to getting something small enough that you can toss it in your pocket or in a backpack. I like shaping dogs to go to a piece of paper and if you can teach your dog to go to something, a mat that's the size of a piece of paper, you can pretty easily transfer that to teaching them to go to an actual piece of paper. And then you can just throw down a napkin if you're at a restaurant, for example, dining outdoors and you want your dog to settle somewhere, or a menu or an envelope or a piece of paper, right? We can still, even in this digital age, we can usually find some kind of piece of paper to put on the ground. And that's a sort of nice, makeshift, quick way to give your dog information about where you want him to be.
And once you have a dog who knows how to go to a mat, who has this sticky spot, of course you're, you're shaping at that point can be just “I'm encouraging the behavior of you just continuing to be on this mat.I want to encourage the behavior of you relaxing on the mat.” Or you can even kind of play a silent game with your dog that other people might not notice.For example, sometimes, I'll wait until my dog rests his chin on the mat when he's lying down and I'll reward that. If I'm in public or whatever, I might not use a clicker or a word like “yes,” but you certainly can. And again, you're just helping your dog figure out, “oh, the thing, the thing the human wants from me in this situation is just relaxing. And that's what putting my head down is about.”
Of course, you could go even smaller than a piece of paper. And really when dogs are trained tobe on sets or to do any kind of modeling, really they're just shaped to go to something really, really small, like postage stamp style small and t's the same process as teaching them to go to that big yoga mat, you are just constantly raising your criteria to the point where the dog can understand, “Oh, I need to go to that tiny piece of tape and lie down when I get there.”
Now you can, of course, keep working on shaping with other things too. You can shape your dog to go into a crate. You can shape your dog to go to his or her bed. There's a never ending amount of things you can shape, be they fun or useful. But certainly I think shaping to a place is a very good beginner exercise for both developing your abilities, as a trainer and your dog's abilities at understanding what it is that you want and sort of building your dog's creativity at figuring things out.
So if you shape your dog to go to a mat, I would love to see it. Go ahead and put in our Facebook group. Our Facebook group is facebook.com/groups/schoolforthedogs or tag School for the Dogs on Instagram. Definitely check out Karen Pryor’s 10 laws of shaping, which is in Don't Shoot the Dog, which is a book I highly recommend and I will also link to that in the show notes.
Fun Dog Fact of the Day before Karen Pryor was a dog training guru and I would say guru is a good word for her. I learned to become a dog trainer at the Karen Pryor Academy. I often attend Clicker Expo, which is her semi annual gathering of dog trainers. Anyway, before she was a dog trainer, she was a dolphin trainer, but before she was a dolphin trainer, she was actually a breastfeeding expert. She wrote a book in the sixties called Nursing your Baby. And there's still plenty of people who are fans of her work in that realm who probably have no idea that she has a major reputation as being something of an inspiration to so many animal trainers throughout the world.
And our Woof Shout Out goes to little Ellie who is a toy Aussie Shepherd and she recently traveled to Europe. I think she went to a few places, I know she went to Prague with her human, Winnie and she brought her School for the Dogs mat and Winnie, her person posted some pretty cool photos of her all throughout her travels, dining outside, dining inside with her, her little Ellie on her mat. And as soon as she put that mat out, Ellie knew exactly what to do, which was to just stay, stay put, be chill. And it was pretty cool to see some good training being put to use.
So I hope you get some use out of your newfound shaping abilities and your new found sticky spot this holiday season. And I look forward to hearing all about it.
Links:
101 Things you can do with a box
