Welcome, everyone to shape by dog.

I am Susan Garrett.

And today, we are going to answer the question.

Susan, what do you mean by shape by dog?

Like, what is shaping exactly?

And how is it that a dog or dogs can do that for us?

Great question.

And by the way, if you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to leave them in the

comments on my blog or send them to us at wag at dogzat.com.

That somebody and our customer happiness department will happily forward that on to me. Shaping. Shaping is one of the four ways. I mentioned there's

four ways that we can train a dog. We can hope, just hope that it gets better. We can use primarily

punishment to say, you know what, you better knock that off and you better stop doing that.

We can use lures to get a dog to do what you want, or we can use reinforcement-based, game-based

training, which is the big overall name

is called shaping. And shaping is not always game-based. That's the difference in what we do and what

maybe a more scientific approach to it is. And in science, they call this training a dog by successive approximations. Don't turn off

the podcast, please. Think of the game. I don't know if you ever played the game, red light,

green light, no, not the hot and cold game as a kid. So somebody would hide something in the room

and that you would move in a direction and they would say,

you're getting warm.

And if you turn the wrong direction, they'd say, no, you're cold.

And then if you turn back in the right direction, they'd say, you're getting warm.

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