Lure-and-Reward Training for Dogs

This is how to teach your dog to do practically anything about tips for dog obedience training. For our first trick we're teaching a baby river to spin in a circle. Step one lure the dog. Put the treat in front of the dog's nose and get her to follow it into the position you want. When she does say your marker word or click your clicker and then give her a treat. From now on this will be referred to as mark and reward. Some dogs won't follow the lure at first they might just stand there and stare blankly. They need to be taught how to play the lure game first. So forget step one for now and start with step zero, teach the lure game. Just get your dog to go after the lure and then once she is enthusiastically following the lure. We can go back to step one, lure the dog. You might be able to get the entire behavior in one lower other dogs might have some trouble with that. Like with a spin trick some dogs might get stuck halfway through the turn.

Shaping Dog Training

In that case break it down a bit start by marking and rewarding for partial turns and then a little bit more of a turn until eventually you're getting the complete spin. Repeat step one enough that the dog is consistently following the war into position every time. don't add the vocal cue yet. It probably feels like you should start singing the voice command right away but that actually doesn't come until later. Step two fading the lure add a hand signal. How many dogs do you know who will only do their trick if there is a treat right in front of their face. There is a very fine line between lure reward and bribery. If you get stuck on the lure step for too long it becomes bribery, so as quickly as possible stop using the lure. after about two successful sessions of step one, to start step two you're going to pretend that you still have a tree in your hand. Make the exact same hand motion and then when the dog does the thing mark and reward with a treat out of your other hand.

If she doesn't follow your hand without a treat then you're probably trying to progress too quickly. So go back and work on a step one for a little while longer with each successful. Repetition of step two you are slowly making it more obvious that you're not actually holding any food in your hand. Can I add the vocal cue yet? No, not yes, not for this step, not until step three, and the vocal cue.Okay you chatty primate now that your dog is consistently following your hand signal every time you can start adding the voice command. You don't want to add the vocal cue before the dog has a decent understanding of what you're asking her to do. If you add it too early you run the risk of her associated with the wrong behavior. So this time while you're doing the hand signal say your voice command. I'm using the cue clockwise with river, but you can pick whatever cue you want. As you do each rep of this step the hand motion becomes less exaggerated until it ends up as the final hands ignore.

What happens next which I forgot to film for some reason is fading out the hand signal entirely if you want to. You do this by saying the cue before you do the hang signal. So instead of doing what you've been doing so far which is clockwise it becomes clockwise. The dog will figure out that the voice command predicts the hand signal which prompts the behavior. Soon you just can cut out the middleman of the hand signal and just go from voice command to behavior. Let’s recap, step 1 lure the dog. Step 2 fade the lure. Step 3 add the both of you. Okay so there you have it that is lure reward. Next time we're going to talk about the slightly more complicated method of shaping. I hope you have found lure/reward training in this articel, and you can make starting fast.