Anything goes!

In the process of using capturing as part of the teaching process I stumble upon some very funny, probably useless skills I can put on cue.

Capturing is the name of a teaching process that allows the teacher to take advantage of coincidences. A simple example would be: You happen to notice your dog is lying on the floor. You also have been wanting to teach your dog to lie down on cue. You can use this opportunity to reward the dog just for occupying the down position. Every time you find your dog lying down you can reward him. After a while you will notice that the dog is volunteering to lie down a lot more often. You can then teach the dog that the name for this position is “down”.

That process is called capturing.

Its a lot of fun.

What is most fun about it is that it encourages the dog to think and after being rewarded for surprisingly easy things the dog will offer all kinds of behaviors just to see if this or that could earn a reward as well.

Will, the little border terrier,  is rather vocal by nature. He naturally emits a plethora of sounds, some rather LOUD.

So in the process of teaching him “quiet”, I also have been trying to reinforce sounds that are less deafening.

This is how the following “trick” evolved.

As you can see it isn’t exactly useful:) but you never know what might happen next!