101 Things to do With a Box

The purpose of this game is to get your dog thinking and trying new things. Use free-shaping to reward any interaction with the box and build from there.  There are no wrong answers.  The goal is for your dog to have the experience of being creative, and getting rewarded for it.  "101 Things to do With a Box" is a great confidence building opportunity.

Start off clicking looking at the box, then move on to touching the box, etc. Click the same behavior a few times till your dog understands what he's getting clicked for. You know your dog understands when he immediately does the same thing he did before and expects that click afterwards.

Once your dog understands that, for instance, touching the box with his paw is earning the click, then delay the click for a stronger behavior, such as pawing two times or knocking the box over. Get as creative as you want with this, with a large enough box you could teach your dog to sit, stand or lay down inside of it.

You can also use other objects, as long as they are safe for the dog.  This exercise might lead to some cute trick idea.  I played this game with Lucy, my nearly blind dog.  We used an empty shampoo bottle (plastic) instead of the box.  Lucy learned to knock over the bottles and I put it on the cue "bang bang". 

Then after making a cardboard "fence" for the front of a box, we had our Annie Oakley trick.  I dressed in a cowgirl outfit, complete with holster and pistol.  I set up our fence and put several small plastic bottles along the top.  We had a skit where I'd pretend to shoot the bottle targets and each time I said "bang bang", Lucy ran out and knocked one of them off.  Sometimes she'd miss or not hit hard enough, so I'd missed the target.  Mostly she hit them.  Sometimes it took awhile for her to decide which one to knock off - that bullet took the scenic route.  And then there were the times it ricocheted off the wall and knocked a second bottle off the fence.  No matter how it went, it was always funny and generated a lot of laughter. 

Gimme here:  I've told you before how much I love free shaping.  I'm very clever so I come up with lots of very creative ideas.  My person made a cardboard cube with spotted paper and she wanted me to roll it across the floor with my nose.  We eventually got there, but not before I showed her my own clever ideas.  I showed her I could:

• ski across the carpet with both front feet on it
• pounce on it with both front feet
• stand on it with both front feet
• bat it across the room with my foot
• put both feet on it and do a forehand pivot
• step on with one back foot
• try to step on it with both back feet
• kick it with a back foot
• dig at it with my front feet
• roll on my back and flip it into the air like a ball of yarn (like a kitty, only much cuter)
• stand over it and spin around it with no feet on it
• roll on my back and hug it with both front feet

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.

Overall Training Plan

Stages of Learning
Effective training follows a pattern of "stages".  There are six stages of learning for you to work through if your dog is going to be well trained and reliable.  People who are training with canine performance goals in mind, should aim to train through all six stages.  Those who simply want an great companion who is a joy to live with, may not need to go that far.  Do realize, some behaviors don't even have all three of the last stages as components.

Once you teach your dog several behaviors and go through the 6 Stages of Learning for each, you notice your dog understands the pattern and knows what comes next.  With reward based training, your dog becomes a willing partner who is eager to learn.  So, the more you train the faster and easier it gets.  Be careful though - reward based training is so much fun that it can be really addictive.

The 6 Stages of Learning are:

1. Get the behavior
2. Add the verbal cue
3. Wait for the cue
4. Add distraction
5. Add duration
6. Add distance

Get the Behavior
In order to reinforce a behavior, you must first "get the behavior". You cannot reinforce what is not happening. There are five general methods to get a behavior: Capturing, Luring, Free Shaping, Targeting and Modeling.  Each will be discussed in detail in a separate blog entry.  They each have advantages and disadvantages.
 
People tend to have preferences about which they use the most. I have noticed many dogs seem to have preferences or at least differences in their learning style that make one or another more effective for them.
 
Your goal should be to have a working understanding of all five methods and know when to best use each.

In this blog you will notice that I speak of "shaping" a behavior and also "free shaping" as a method to get a behavior.

• Shaping refers to the process of gradually changing the behavior you are getting to get closer to a final version of the behavior.
• Free shaping as a method to get behavior refers to using shaping only with what the dog offers to you (i.e. not using capturing, luring, modeling or targeting to prompt the behavior).

Capturing is most effective for behaviors your dog already does in a more or less complete form. Such as: sit, sit up and beg, down and potty. Each dog has its own repertoire of things it does frequently. Capturing is not effective for teaching the dog to do something that he is unlikely to do naturally.

Luring is best used for getting the dog to move or assume a position, such as luring into a sit or down, or luring them to walk alongside you.

Free Shaping is sort of an advanced form of "capturing" and is used well for behaviors the dog does not offer or do naturally as a complete thing. It develops your dog's creativity and confidence and makes learning into a cool game for the dog.

Gimme here:  I especially love free shaping games.  I'm very clever and creative and I have oodles of confidence, so I can really shine when we play this game.  I'm not bragging, it's the truth.


Targeting is best used to get your dog to move somewhere or when a behavior involves a specific place. Your dog can be taught to target a margarine lid, target stick, your hand, his leash or his bed (or any thing for that matter).

Modeling/Molding involves physical manipulation of the dog into a position or place. It can be effective for simple behaviors with some dogs. Many dogs seem to resent being physically manipulated into position or are uncomfortable with being touched or held in certain ways.