Skip to main content

Shaping

Shaping is a dog training technique used for more complex behaviours or ones that are not naturally being offered up by your dog.

Shaping involves breaking the behaviour down into small pieces, and then rewarding your dog for each of those small steps, rewarding further progress toward the end goal.

Teaching actions through shaping generally takes much longer than other methods but it seems that shaping leads to more reliable actions in the long run and the process of shaping with your dog speeds up further shaping training.