Free Shaping: Teaching a Dog to Shut a Drawer

Another snippet of clicker training - the layman's term for operant conditioning - where I work with Zada the German shepherd on free shaping. The goal is to teach her to close a drawer with her nose.

Since I'd already worked with her on this exercise, she was quick to start pushing the drawer; in the beginning I worked on getting her to target the drawer - while closed - with her nose. We then worked up to having the drawer open and I progressed through intermittent reinforcement to shape the behavior of pushing the drawer.

This isn't the finished product; eventually I'd shape the behavior of only shoving the drawer once to get it to close. Once that behavior was consistently occurring, then I'd add a cue to prompt the behavior.

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• free shaping
• targeting training
• clicker training
• train a dog to close a drawer