Positive Training Blog Hop: Shaping the "Bang Trick"

Its National Train Your Dog Month.  With that there is a new Blog Hop called Positive Pet Training which will occur on the first Monday of every month.  Its being hosted by Cascadian Nomads, Dachshund Nola, and Tenacious Little Terrier.

When I got Teach, almost 3 years ago, I started researching different methods of training.  With to much correction Teach would shut down so I knew I had to do some changes in how I had been taught to train dogs years ago.  My research lead to me to learn about shaping.  This is something very new for us.  I recently did two posts about this a few weeks ago, Learning to Shape & More Shaping.  If you want to check those out feel free.  It kind of gives a back ground on shaping and what we've done so far.

Today for the blog hop I want to show our end result of teaching the Bang Trick.  When I first started this trick with Teach (when he was a puppy) I did it the old way (the only way I really knew) and that was pushing him over and saying bang as he got a treat.  He just didn't comprehend that way at all.  So I knew there had to be another way and I found it.

The post I did about this showed several videos which I will show again here.  They are the steps we used to obtain the behavior I wanted.

The first video is just Teach going to his bed and laying down.  You'll see in this video that I did lure his head over and once that was achieved a light bulb went off for him.

The second video I have removed the bed and he knows that I want him to lay down and then over to his side.  

The last video I have is the end result when I just added the cue to it.

We do this sporadically in the house now with great results.  We haven't moved to doing it outside or in other environments when there are more distractions but that will come.

This method of training makes the dog think and try things to make that click happen.  He loves to try and figure things out himself. Love just watching his brain work and his tail wag the whole time.

Thanks to the 3 hosts of this fun hop.  Looking forward to more this year.  Being new to the positive training techniques this is something that does interest us.  We are currently working on some new behaviors using the shaping technique and I will provide those through the hop each month.