Shaping Succes

 I recently took a shaping class through Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. The instructor was Sue Ailsby and it was excellent.  I've been familiar with clicker training for a while, but I wanted to fine tune my skills. I was kinda blown away by how much I learned. I had several "duh" moments and was honestly amazed at how much my dogs have learned in spite of me.

The two biggest things I came away with were that I really need to up my rate of reinforcement and break it down more. It became very obvious that I ask for too much, too quickly. I need to make sure my dog has more feedback and success.

Today I did a shaping session where I had Kenzi pick up socks and drop them in a crate. We've worked on the behaviors before - targeting, taking and bringing a variety of objects and recently standing with her head over a box (in preparation for this). But today I put it all together communicating with just the clicker.

There are some things I've noticed in this video that I need to improve on, but overall I'm really loving where this is going.