Hey there. Welcome back for another episode of drinking from the toilet, where we are serious about having fun, seriously geeking out on dog training.

I'm your host, Hannah Branigan. I get a lot of requests from listeners to talk more about

the topic of shaping, particularly folks want to know more and more about splitting and how

and when to increase criteria. You know what? Me too. This is one of those things where the more I learn,

the more I peel away layers, the more layers there are underneath. And we can kind of go

infinitely down there. And hey, you know what, let's go for it. So a fear that I have,

and I know many of you share, is in being frozen between increasing criteria too quickly, aka

lumping, or increasing too slowly and permanently damaging my dog by trapping him in this

unfinished foundation state where we never actually complete any behaviors.

And I also worry that I'm permanently damaging him by my paralysis.

It's a tough problem, a real problem.

So this week, I want to talk about plateaus in shaping behavior and why we want to avoid them

and a few things we can do with our training to try to avoid that.

So to be effective with our shaping, to really optimize it, we want to strive for continuous

incremental progress.

I've heard Kay Lawrence talk about making every single rep look just a little bit different

from the previous one so that we avoid getting stuck in a rut.

And when we're doing this at our very best, we increment every rep, but in such small increments that the dog is always winning.

But that's easier said than done.

We want those increments to be so small that the dog always has a really good chance of being correct, that he almost doesn't even notice that there's anything really different from one rep to the next. It's just

natural and, you know, moves continuously for him from his perspective. And we need to be reasonably

sure that the next version of the behavior is actually going to occur in order for us to make

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