Shortly after you get your new puppy you decide it might be nice to teach him or her to Sit, lie Down or perhaps even Shake hands. So out you go to the back yard and start pushing down on your puppy's backside saying 'Sit', or putting out your hand and asking your puppy to 'Shake' only to have your palm vigorously licked and sniffed. But no sign of a Sit, or a Shake. And you seem further from a Down than ever. This isn't really an uncommon situation, but what went wrong?

One aspect of the learning process that applies to both canines and humans is the idea of Shaping a behaviour, that is, building up to the final behaviour in very small and achievable steps, rather than launching into trying to achieve the final result straight off and expecting miracles to happen.

There are many aspects to dog training, and in fact many aspects just to the process of Shaping, but we're only talking about the general process of Shaping here. A short definition and a list of the basic principles involved is a good starting point:

Shaping is the process of fine tuning a response to a cue by small degrees until the desired outcome is achieved.

Some of the most important principles involved in the Shaping process are:

• Work in very small steps. How big the steps can be and how fast you can progress depends on your dog. Let them set the pace but be ready to move to the next step once they've mastered the old one!
• You know your dog knows the old step well enough when you get the sense that they've 'predicted' what you want when you start giving the cue.
• Only shape for one aspect of the behaviour at a time. Never shape for say duration and distance at the same time! If you do, the dog will be unclear what's required to achieve the food reward and they'll just get frustrated.
• Shaping works well for the dog because every step is so achievable. Frustration is eliminated! Learning becomes exciting and rewarding, instead of difficult and vague.
• Shaping works well for the trainer as well because many times a day, in a very visible way, the dog makes progress. And nothing is more rewarding for a teacher than seeing their hard work pay off.
• Once a shaping step is learned, it seems to stay learned forever. Even if you progress to other steps, it seems you can always go back to an earlier step and the dog hasn't forgotten.
• Although Shaping seems a slow process, becuase of the many small steps involved, the process still often happens very quickly. In a single day you can shape 10 steps in a behaviour, and in a week you can teach any new behaviour to almost any complexity. Always step by step.
• NEVER discourage your dog during training. Don't tell them 'No' or yell at them, or do anything negative. If you want them to learn, the worst consequence they should face is that they don't get the food treat. Always leave the way open for them to keep trying, again and again, and reward them when they get it right

To see how Shaping works, here is an example of how to train a dog to lie down.

Start by being always aware of how much you can ask of your dog at each step. An older dog that is well-trained and used to the training environment won't have any trouble focusing in the fascinating, noisy, fragrant, movement-filled world of the big outdoors, but an 8 week old puppy will hardly be able to contain themselves with excitement in somewhere like the back yard, particularly if they don't spend lots of time out there. So the first thing to do is to start getting your puppy's attention. Call their name, when they look, give them a treat. Make sure you can get your puppy's attention even with distractions around.

Start by training indoors, in a familiar place. A later Shaping step will be to move the training outdoors where there are more distractions, and eventually to the dog park where the ultimate doggy distractions can be found - other dogs.

Sit on the ground with a bowl of food treats. Perhaps don't use kibble to start with, you might need something more interesting like sliced hot dogs to get and keep your puppy's attention right at the start. Later you can shape your dog to respond to less interesting treats like kibble. But that comes later. Much later, and in any case is a very gradual process.

Start by getting your dog to sit (there are other books on how to do this) then hold a treat between your fingers and move it to your dog's nose, then lower your hand to the ground in front of your dog, and away from their body. Chances are your puppy's nose has been glued to your fingers from the moment they smelled food, and so has followed your fingers to the ground. As you move your fingers along the ground away from your puppy, their natural body position will fall down into a 'Down' position.

That's the first Shaped behaviour! A small, achievable, simple goal that is well on the way to a stable Down when given just a verbal command. Notice that nothing was said, no command was given, in fact the command comes later. We are also still sitting on the floor, and still indoors. Not a very exciting outcome perhaps, right now all that's happend is we've lured the dog (using an elicitor - i.e. the food treat) through a set of physical motions so they ended up in the position we wanted. We need the dog to become familiar with this movement, to the point where they do it automatically - certain of what we mean - whenever we lower our fingers to the ground in this way.

Important: As you start each new Shaping step, be sure to keep the food treats coming! You can phase it out for a shaping step, once that step is learned, but keep using rewards as you progress onto and through a new step.

The next Shaping step is to guide the dog into the Down position without food between your fingers. The food can be elsewhere and given to the dog as soon as it reaches the ground. Humans were blessed with two hands, and the second hand works well to hold the food treat while the first hand guides the dog to the ground. What are we shaping here? Well, instead of simply 'luring' or 'bribing' the dog into position, we are actually shaping the dog to follow a definite hand gesture. The food comes into it once the dog has achieved the desired position, and the hand gesture becomes a 'cue' for the dog. We are shaping a cue!

Once your dog is reliably following your fingers to the ground - without food between them - we can start to get up off the floor. Start by kneeling before your dog, use the same hand gesture and repeat it until they are again reliably going Down. Here we are shaping our body position relative to the dog, so they become accustomed to accepting the Down command from us, no matter what position we are in.

Next, don't drop your hand all the way to the ground. Start doing the Down gesture further and further away from your dog's nose. Shape the process 1 centimetre at a time, and each time make sure your dog still knows what you mean. Work this way until you're able to stand up and just give a quick 'Down' gesture and your dog magically lies down. We have then shaped distance into the cue, as well as having shaped the cue itself.

Finally, add a verbal command to the hand gesture. We shape the command by giving the hand gesture and saying 'Down' when the dog achieves the Down position, then gradually fading out the hand signal. Bit by bit the hand signal gets less pronounced, until in the end it's barely a movement at all. The only thing that's left is the voice commmand.

That's it! Or is it? Well, now we have a stable 'Down' command in place, but the Shaping process can continue forever if we want it. You can shape the duration of the down - how long does the dog have to lie down before they get the food reward. Do it in 5 second increments. Remember, always very small steps. Start by not asking your dog to stay Down for more than 2 seconds, but by they end you should be able to ask them to do it for half an hour.

There is no limit to what you can shape. Shape an Away Down by gradually increasing the distance between you and the dog as you train. 10cm at a time. In no time you'll be metres away from your dog, or even across the paddock, and they'll be lying Down in place as soon as you give the 'Down' command.

One of the extraordinary things about shaping is how quickly it can progress. An 8 week old puppy can be taught to Down on verbal command only in under a week, with only 3 training sessions of under 5 minutes each day. But during that training process there can be hundreds of steps to the shaping process.

It might seem counter-productive to have taught your dog to follow your hand to the ground at the start when you will never, in real life, want to have to sit on the ground and guide your dog's nose to the ground just to get your dog to Down. But thinking of it as wasted effort is the wrong approach. It was simply a stepping stone on the way to the final behaviour you did want. And it was critically important for the dog, because as you guided them through easy, achievable steps along the way, their enthusiasm stayed high, and they learned very quickly.

Remembering that one of the principles of Shaping is that a shaping step, once learned, is rarely forgotten, works to our advantage too. If after teaching your dog to Down, you want to teach them to Crawl, the first dozen steps are already in place, and you can get your dog to the ground very quickly with just a hand gesture, and then continue drawing them along the ground so they crawl, using a food treat. The possibilities are endless.

One of the great joys of dog training is seeing the moment of 'Aha!' on a dog's face when they finally understand what you want of them in each shaping step. Hopefully through effective Shaping, many new dog owners will also get to experience that moment, dozens of times a day.