Animal Training Academy

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Extra content & Case studies

Shaping and teaching new behavior

Advanced concepts and tools

Getting started with behavior

Check your cues; dog example

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In this short video, we consider the importance of ensuring the information/cues you provide to your animal are as clear as you can make them. Sometimes we don’t even realize that they might be different ourselves and in the live web-class, we acknowledge the value in filming your training so you can examine details like this. In this example we can see the cue asking the dog to sit has significant variation over a single session which has the potential to cause confusion for the animal.

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Fibi Loose leash walking

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As Sapphire and I get closer to taking a three-week trip to Thailand I need to ensure Fibi is doing a lot of behaviors at fluency. I will admit due to Fibi’s size I have not prioritized loose leash walking before. Normally we go to off-leash areas twice a day and otherwise, I can carry her if necessary. When Fibi was a puppy we did some training on this but nearly 1.5 years has passed since that time. In this video, you can see only the second time we do Loose leash walking on the street with massive success! CLICK HERE to see the video from the last web-class where we train Fibi to put her harness on voluntarily.

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Clear, concise, speedy reinforcement (Dr Clare Browne), Square Training (Jan Ostergaard) – Podcast Hacks

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We didn’t include this video in the live class due to time restrictions but had planned to due to the value in this idea of ensuring the information we provide to our animals (including our cues) are clear and concise.

This is a joint podcast hack where Dr. Clare Brown talks about the benefits of clear concise and speedy reinforcement when training … & Jan Ostergaard from the dog training organization Canis in Europe talks about what he calls square training. Like the previous lesson. I personally like the ideas expressed in these podcast hacks, what do you think, are you a square trainer?

  • To listen to the full podcast episode with Dr. Clare Browne CLICK HERE 
  • To listen to the full podcast episode with Jan Ostergaard CLICK HERE

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Review your training and shaping plans frequently …

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Here is a significant amount of information from the Animal Training Academy resource base to help you get set up writing some good training and shaping plans for your animals. Writing these out help us prioritise where we need to focus our time and energy. It additionally helps to get all of our ideas down on paper and out of our head. Also writing out a good shaping plans ensure that we consider all the successive approximations we might need to do to reach our end goal. I found writing out shaping plans highly beneficial when I first began shaping new behaviors and also when training any new complex behaviors. Another great benefit of writing out our shaping plans is they help us practice splitting rather then lumping. Here are the three documents I use for my training/shaping plans …

  1. Behavioural repertoire document …
  2. Training plan document …
  3. Shaping plan document …

CLICK HERE to see this information in the animal training academy forums …

CLICK HERE for a free lesson on writing shaping plans.

CLICK HERE for the Clicker Training Fundamentals lesson on successive approximations (splitting not lumping).

CLICK HERE for the Clicker Training Fundamentals lesson on writing shaping plans

CLICK HERE for a free lesson to explain the behavioural repertoire document

CLICK HERE for a free podcast on writing training plans featuring Debbi Marrin (the director of training and behavioral husbandry from San Francisco Zoo)

CLICK HERE for a free podcast on shaping behavior with Mikolaj Zybala.

STEP 9. Review your training and shaping plans frequently …

IMG_6604

Here is a significant amount of information from the Animal Training Academy resource base to help you get set up writing some good training and shaping plans for your animals. Writing these out help us prioritise where we need to focus our time and energy. It additionally helps to get all of our ideas down on paper and out of our head. Also writing out good shaping plans ensure that we consider all the successive approximations we might need to do to reach our end goal. I found writing out shaping plans highly beneficial when I first began shaping new behaviors and also when training any new complex behaviors. Another great benefit of writing out our shaping plans is they help us practice splitting rather then lumping. Here are the three documents I use for my training/shaping plans …

  1. Behavioural repertoire document …
  2. Training plan document …
  3. Shaping plan document …

CLICK HERE to see this information in the animal training academy forums …

CLICK HERE for a free lesson on writing shaping plans.

CLICK HERE for the Clicker Training Fundamentals lesson on successive approximations (splitting not lumping).

CLICK HERE for the Clicker Training Fundamentals lesson on writing shaping plans

CLICK HERE for a free lesson to explain the behavioural repertoire document

CLICK HERE for a free podcast on writing training plans featuring Debbi Marrin (the director of training and behavioral husbandry from San Francisco Zoo)

CLICK HERE for a free podcast on shaping behavior with Mikolaj Zybala.

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STEP 8. Empower your animals …

We have to appreciate that our animals might not always want to participate in our training sessions. Consequently we have to listen to them and respond accordingly. We do our best to interpret their body language and allow them to say NO if they don’t feel like it … This helps empower our animals and facilitates them being able to influence their own training. You can see this really beautifully demonstrated in the following video example. You will also see the amazing results achieved just nine days later after implementing the suggestions made in the video …

EXAMPLE

STEP 7. Ensure you provide good clear communication …

Everything you are learning about in this mini course has to do with communication. That is what shaping is, its communicating to an animal via positive reinforcement and successive approximations what you want it to do.  Our animals are constantly absorbing information from their environment and using that information to make decisions about what the best behavior to perform in the present moment is. We leverage this in our training by pairing our animals behavior with predefined cues that we can use to ask them to do a specific behavior. It’s our job to make this information as clear as possible by having well defined, distinct and clear cues. Below is an example of a technique we used to examine our cues and conseqeuntly improve our communication …

EXAMPLE

SIDE NOTE: When thinking about cues and what cues to use, it helps me to think about it from the animals perspective … what is a cue ? It’s a change in the animal’s environment … it’s new information that communicates to your animal … if you do this behavior now then your history tells you that there is a very high probability that reinforcement will follow.
It’s our job to make sure that the information/cues we provide are as clear and as easy to understand as we can possibly make them.

STEP 6. Know what the consequence is for “in-action” …

Let’s face it … you’re animal is not always going to do what you want during a training session. Consequently it’s beneficial to not only think about what reinforcers you are going to deliver when you animal does the right thing … but also what you are going to do when they don’t. Something that I have had huge success with myself is using both short windows of opportunity and LRS

You can learn more about using short windows of opportunities in this free lesson CLICK HERE.

LRS = Less reinforcing stimuli. What this means is that if our animal does something other then what we want then we endeavour to offer them the less reinforcing consequence possible. We don’t want to reinforce the incorrect response, we don’t want to punish the incorrect response … LRS has us trying to be as neutral as possible. Watch the example below to hopefully tie all of this together …

EXAMPLE

STEP 1. Stay super focused on your animal no matter what the distractions.

Focus is super important during your training sessions and when shaping new behaviors. This is because you want to ensure that you are responding to your animal’s behavior with precision timing. Delivering reinforcement the split second your animal does something desirable is one of the key ingredients of being successful. You want to be prepared to reinforce any slight movement towards the final behavior you are trying to train. LASER focus therefore, can be a  highly desirable skill to practice …. Watch the trainer in the next video who’s demonstrating this … even when what some might consider a significant distraction occurs in her training session.

NOTE: This is a wonderful trainer from Scotland who has two rescue male Eclectus parrots. Little is known about the past of these animals although when arriving in their new home their feather condition was less than desirable. They now lead a life full of positive reinforcement training and high levels of enrichment and feather damage has/is decreasing significantly

EXAMPLE

The ULTIMATE guide for shaping new behaviors (Mini-course)

MINI COURSE – 10 steps for shaping success – MINI COURSE

ryan barn owl tiny Hello and welcome to this mini course – the ULTIMATE guide for shaping and training new behaviors. Understanding how shaping works is a really important aspect of managing your animal’s behavior well. I believe that there are also a significant number of skills that are beneficial to develop in order to become efficient and effective shapers of behavior. If you’re unsure about what we mean when we say the word shaping then before you dive into the numerous lessons of this course first make sure to spend some time on the free resources listed below. Then work through the 10 steps for success  and think about how you can implement and/or improve these within your own training. Additionally to assist with this lesson being SUPER beneficial I have also included a FREE PDF for you to print out and hang somewhere that you will be able to consistently see. Go through the PDF printout each time before you go into your training sessions and remind yourself of these 10 steps for success … Enjoy !

EXTRA RESOURCES

CLICK HERE for a FREE podcast on shaping behavior …

CLICK HERE for a FREE lesson on writing shaping plans.

CLICK HERE for the clicker training fundamentals lesson on shaping behavior

CLICK HERE for the clicker training fundamentals lesson on shaping plans

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