How to have a successful shaping session.

And I'm going to flesh that out a little bit more. So, super important that you have a hierarchy

of reinforcement, meaning food that your dog goes cuckoo for cocoa puffs about. Do you have

reinforcement and your dog goes, oh my gosh, yes. And do you have

reinforcements? When I say a hierarchy, if you have a dog, like, for example, Tater Salad, if I use

his number one reinforcement, he might get too crazy, which is kind of funny because he was a pretty

laid-back dog who really didn't want to work when he arrived here as a 15-month-old rescue dog.

But he gets so jacked up. So I would use like lesser value reinforcements for him when I'm

shaping a more precision behavior. So hierarchy of reinforcement. And for those of you who say,

my dog really doesn't want to work, that is where you're starting. You're creating a hierarchy of reinforcement

so that your dog will take the food. And I spoke about that in episode number 259. Second,

you're going to have those location specific reinforcement markers. Cook, search, and I really

encourage you to use chow as well, which is there's a cookie in the bowl.

You can take the cookie out of the bowl. Or for those of us who are raw eaters, I put a

spoonful of the food in the bowl. Now, if I throw a cookie beside the bowl and I say search,

they aren't to take the food from the bowl. Only take the food from the bowl

if they hear chow or whatever location specific reinforcement marker you're going to use.

So cook, come into your mouth, search, look for it on the floor. And search is a great

cue when we're working to create a targeting. Remember in episode number 259, I had you shape the dog

onto a blanket. We made that blanket smaller and smaller. Now, we have a paw target.

Well, the way we're going to build in more and more reinforcement for that dog finding value

in putting their paws on a target is we're going to use what's called a reset cookie.

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