Free Shaping to Get Behaviors

Free shaping is almost an advanced form of "capturing" and works well for behaviors the dog does not offer or do naturally as a complete behavior. It develops your dog's creativity and confidence and makes learning into a cool game for the dog.  It also develops very sophisticated body awareness. The drawback is that it requires more patience on the part of the trainer. Also, some crossover dogs (dogs that were initially trained by compulsion methods) may not offer behaviors or may be slow to learn to initiate during the training process.

Gimme here:  I especially love free shaping.  I'm very clever and its a fun game to figure out what my person wants.  She recently taught me 5 different tricks this way.  I can step backwards putting my back feet into a box, get up on a plastic tub and sit, lay on my back with my feet in the air, put my head under a chair, and push a cube across the floor with my nose.  My person says we are going to work these tricks through all six stages of learning and then I'll be even smarter than I am now.  I'm really smart already, so I'll be awesomely brilliant after we are done.  I'm just saying.

You start by clicking/treating the barest hint of the behavior you want to end up with, and then concentrate on taking small steps closer to your goal.  I find it helpful to imagine the whole form as a video tape and then watching the tape frame-by-frame. Each frame of the video tape represents one possible increment of the shaping process.

For example, you might free shape a left spin.  The process could be to click/treat when:

          ·  your dog just looks to the left
          ·  when he turns his head to the left
          ·  when he turns his head further left
          ·  when he turns it far enough to shift his weight leftward
          ·  when he turns enough to take a step to the left
          ·  a head turn and two steps
          ·  a head turn and three steps
          ·  gradually a turn in a complete circle
          ·  two circles
          ·  faster circles

Years ago I taught my nearly blind dog Lucy to ride her skateboard.  Because of her visual handicap, if she was going to be comfortable doing this trick, I had to be very careful.  It turned out to be a useful exercise to teach me to increment the process in fine detail.   Here is the process I used.

Because I wanted her to be very confident of the skateboard in preparation for its later movement, I first started with a board on the ground (without wheels). I clicked/treated for the following steps (for a dog less confident in offering, I would have used even smaller steps):

          ·  looking toward the board
          ·  stepping toward the board
          ·  nose touch or sniffing the board (since I eventually wanted her 
              feet on the board I didn’t accept too many of these nose bops,
              just enough to confirm for her that the board was in fact the deal)
          ·  stepping around and over the board
          ·  accidentally stepping on the board
          ·  pawing at the board
          ·  standing on the board with one foot
          ·  standing on the board with both feet (in hindsight, when the board
              was up on wheels it was wobbly when she stepped on either end,
              so I wished I’d shaped standing in a specific place on the board)

Once the wheels were added the free shaping continues to encourage standing on a board that is no longer flat on the ground and I’d be prepared to "start over" if need be. I set the board up on bricks so it wouldn’t move under her feet. I clicked and treated as follows:

          ·  looking toward the board
          ·  stepping over the board
          ·  pawing at the board
          ·  standing on the board with one foot
          ·  standing on the board with both feet – to encourage her to stay
              on, I stayed nearby & quickly delivered treats while her feet
              were still on it

To get started with the board moving, I wrapped lots of rags around the wheels (held in place with rubber bands) so that it would only move a tiny bit. I clicked and treated as needed to get her back to confidently standing on the board. Then the steps were:

          ·  standing on the board for longer periods of time
          ·  pushing the board with her feet and hopping off – initially I clicked
              even if she hopped off when it moved so she didn’t feel pressured
              to do something that was uncomfortable, then upped the ante
          ·  pushing on the board and staying with both feet on as it moves

The next step was to free shape her interaction until she put her two front feet on the board and pushed it across the room without getting off. To get her confidently to that sort of control, I set up the training to increment movement is small bites that weren’t scary. The plan was:

          ·  to do the skateboard on a lumpy comforter that didn’t let it move
              much or too quickly
          ·  skateboard on carpet between rolled towels that formed wheel
              chocks so it only moved six inches, then eight inches, then one
              foot, two feet, several feet, across the room
          ·  skateboard on towels over linoleum – again between rolled towels
              that formed wheel chocks to restrict forward movement
          ·  then skateboard on plain linoleum with rolled towel chocks

The critical part of this learning process is that the increments be so fine that the dog gets LOTS of reinforcement and has plenty of motivation to stay in the game. In the case of the skateboard, or anything that has the potential to be scary... it is crucial to set things up so that the steps are so small that you never risk frightening the dog.

Although this sounds like a really involved process, it goes much faster than you might think. Lucy, a very savvy free shaping dog, got through all the board flat on the floor part of the process in one 8 minute session. The next session the wheels were added and we had two 6 minute sessions with rags around the wheels – partly because of trying to get her to get to the center of the board for less wobbly riding. Then one session for each of the remaining four steps.  So just 7 short session and this with a visually handicapped dog.

Although I wrote this out for your benefit, I usually don’t do that much pre-planning for most of my free shaping sessions, although I have a mental picture of how I expect the process to go. As a training exercise for yourself, you could write out a plan for a trick and see how close reality follows your plan.

The other part of free shaping that is important is to consider those times when using bits and pieces of other ways to get the behavior might be useful. For instance, since I initially let Lucy step anywhere on the board, to help her get the idea of stepping on the middle of the board, I used a yellow post-it note to attract her attention.  In hindsight (or if I hit a snag in her skateboard training and decided to back up) it could have been a valuable approach to teach her to target a post-it note on the floor, then move it to the board. Never be afraid to experiment or combine methods.  In reality most training is some combination of the five methods anyway.

Remember, if marine mammal specialists can free shape a multi-ton walrus (with the capability of easily maiming or killing its handlers) to present its flipper through safety bars for a blood draws, then you can free shape just about anything your dog is physically capable of doing.

Because the trick possibilities with free shaping are practically limitless, I'm not giving you a list of trick ideas. Keep it fun, keep it safe...

Remember: You are limited only by your own creativity.