Karen's Letters

Shaping is a concept that many pet owners find hard to grasp. We're used to making animals do things by leading them or pushing them into the behavior we want—and it is hard to believe that there is another way. Common sense tells us that there is no possible way to get an animal to do something it has never done before, doing nothing yourself but reinforcing spontaneous movements.

When I first took a dog to obedience class, back in the Pleistocene, we were given six weeks to teach our dog to obey five basic commands: sit, down, stay, heel, and come. The behaviors were a given: these are the things any well-trained, obedient dog should be able to do. The important thing was not just doing the behavior, but Obeying the Command No Matter What. Perhaps the most important of all the behaviors, and the most difficult, was the long down. Could your dog lie down and stay down while you walked away? Could he stay there until you came back and told him he could get up? What if his mortal enemy was next to him, or the instructor walked behind him, or some other dog got up and came over to him? Never mind! He'd better not budge! If he moved, we screamed, "No! Down!" and rushed back and jerked him into position again.