E56: Julie Daniels - "Confidence Building through Shaping"

Summary:

Julie Daniels has worked with dogs her whole life. In fact, she learned to walk by holding on to a German Shepherd. She is one of the foremost names in the sport of dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country get up and running.

She owns and operates both Kool Kids Agility in Deerfield, NH, and White Mountain Agility in North Sandwich, NH.

Julie is well known as a premier teacher at all levels of play. She has competed, titled, and won with all sorts of dogs through the years, including two Rottweilers, a Springer Spaniel, a Cairn Terrier, two Corgis, and four Border Collies. She is the only person to make USDAA National Grand Prix finals with a Rottie or a Springer, and she did it two times each. She is also a two-time national champion and a two-time international champion.

Links

• Kool Kids Agility
• White Mountain Agility

Next Episode:

To be released 4/06/2018, featuring Dr. Jessica Hekman to talk about building a performance dog.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau, and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we'll be talking to Julie Daniels.

Julie has worked with dogs her whole life. In fact, she learned to walk by holding on to a German Shepherd. She is one of the foremost names in the sport of dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country get up and running.

She owns and operates both Kool Kids Agility in Deerfield, NH, and White Mountain Agility in North Sandwich, NH.

Julie is well known as a premier teacher at all levels of play. She has competed, titled, and won with all sorts of dogs through the years, including two Rottweilers, a Springer Spaniel, a Cairn Terrier, two Corgis, and four Border Collies. She is the only person to make USDAA National Grand Prix finals with a Rottie or a Springer, and she did it two times each. She is also a two-time national champion and a two-time international champion.

Hi Julie! Welcome to the podcast.

Julie Daniels: Hi Melissa.

Melissa Breau: To jump into things, can you just share a little bit of information about the dogs you currently share your life with and what you're working on with them?

Julie Daniels: I have three Border Collies at this time, and my oldest, who is 12-and-a-half — don't tell her that — she recently injured herself. She tore the collateral ligament in her knee. That's a long rehab, and although she's 12, it is very difficult to keep her down. But my best friend is Karen Kay, who is an expert in rehab for both people and for dogs, a fitness expert, so we're diligently bringing Boss back, slowly but surely. But it's tough. Even at 12-and-a-half, if a dog is used to taking a lot of activity and getting a lot of exercise, it's very, very difficult to tone that down and do specific things. But anyway, that's my 12-year-old.

My 10-year-old is Sport, and he's a finished product. He likes training as much as anybody. It's just a pleasure to live with and to show he's quite the guy.

My youngster, now 2-and-a-half, is Kool-Aid, and I'm having a lot of fun with her. Kool-Aid has been a Fenzi-ite her entire life, so she's one of the stars, even in Baby Genius and also in Adolescent Sport Dogs. She's just a pleasure to work with and train. You'll see a lot of her.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. I know here at FDSA one of the things you're perhaps most well known for is your "Genius" series. I know a big part of those classes — and all of your classes, really — is about building confidence. Can you share a little bit about why that's so critical for young dogs and maybe how you go about it?

Julie Daniels: Right off the bat in puppyhood, we want our dogs to feel excited about the environment. We want them to do a couple of things. We want to nurture curiosity so that they feel attraction for novelty, which is the natural puppy trait. It is something they were born with — puppies are born curious — so I feel it's up to us to nurture that; yes, to guide it and direct it, but not to lose it. Don't lose that curiosity. Not so different from human children, I think. That's a very important thing.

The other thing we want to do is develop a small measure of self-reliance in very young dogs so that they offer interaction with the world. And that gives us a chance to choose — to shape, if you will — what we like best about their behavior choices so that we can guide them along the way to a mutually satisfying life with humans.

So yeah, those two things.

Melissa Breau: To dig in a little bit into one of the Genius classes, Baby Genius is on the calendar for April. How much of that class is about teaching skills and "learning to learn," for lack of a better term, and how much is about teaching the dogs a positive attitude toward life and training?

Julie Daniels: They're both so important. They're both pretty much flipsides of the same coin. I think it's super, super important that you never get away from how the dog feels about life. So that positive conditioned emotional response that we all talk about, the positive CER, is really for interacting with people, interacting with the environment, as I spoke of before. We want to develop the curiosity and the initiative of the very young dog, and that starts in Baby Genius, big time.

So it's not just about skills, no matter what you do. Even if you are training skills, you're always working on how the dog feels about life and how the dog feels about interacting with you, training with you, playing with you, if you will. So I have to say that the class is pretty much half of one and half of the other.

It's not so much about skills. Good question, Melissa. I really thought about how to respond to that, and I'm thinking half and half, but it's probably more about life and less about specific skills. Guidance, yes, lots of guidance, and puppy's choice is extremely important in the class. So things are, by design, geared toward helping them choose behaviors that we would like for them to keep, but it's probably more about life, Melissa, and less about skills. So there you go.

Melissa Breau: With that said, what are some of the skills you cover?

Julie Daniels: Ah! I have to give those away? Let me talk about one that's both, because I could go on all day about that, and you probably have another question or two for me. So why don't I talk about one in specific that I think is maybe a good example of the life version and the skills version, and that would be the recall, because you can't do a baby class without working on recall, and yet I don't really start out working on recall at all.

I work on name. I want to create extremely high value for name and attraction, orientation, toward the sound of name. So that's not operant. That's classical conditioning. And I do a whole lot with that just with the little name game. When you're playing name game — with any dog, mind you, not just with a baby; it happens to me a lot that I get adult dogs in for board and train, and they need a refresher on how they feel about hearing their name. It happens to many, many dogs that they've learned not to enjoy hearing their name, so I change it. But with babies it's so easy and fun to just play games, and don't forget: say your dog's name and don't think it's not a recall. Don't think, Oh, the dog needs to be going the other way when I call his name. No, no. It's classical conditioning I'm talking about, so I want that dog to love, love, love the sound of his own name.

That's different from the operant games that we play for instilling a recall, which are also important. That's the skills part. But when you ask me whether it's more skills or more enjoyment, you know, life enjoyment, I think it's life enjoyment. I think name game is much, much, much more important in Baby Genius, much more important than the skill of, for example, recall.

Melissa Breau: I imagine that the skills you focus on puppies has evolved some over time and that all of this didn't just spring from your brain fully formed. Do you mind sharing just a little bit about how you've decided over the years what it is important to focus on with a puppy versus what you really can wait on until the dog is a little bit older?

Julie Daniels: That's fun, isn't it? It's hard to break a brain apart into various classes when you want to teach everything at once. This program started at least twenty years ago with a camp that I did up at White Mountain Agility. I was doing five to eight camps per year, and one of them I decided had to be only for novices. I called it Novice Geniuses, and that camp was a huge success.

It was tons of fun, if you can imagine, and it was very, very useful for a lot of people in learning to start their dogs off on the right foot. It certainly was adamant about how the dog feels about it is much more important than whether the dog takes away this particular skill or that particular skill. So it was a great camp like that.

And that's what I started out to do for FDSA. I called it Puppy Genius, and it was pretty much the Novice Genius program with a very few elements left out, which were for older dogs. Ultimately it was way too big a territory. It was too large a class in scope, and so I then broke it down into two classes called Baby Genius, for these youngsters, and that's what's coming up in April for the young dogs, and then Adolescent Sport Dog is what I called the former older dog elements of Novice Genius. I tried to break the class into two and then expand upon each of the elements within that smaller scope, and I think that worked out really well. That's what I'll continue to do.

So Baby Genius really is for the younger dogs, and as we all know, foundation is everything, and so many dogs can benefit from Baby Genius. Any dog could benefit from the Baby Genius class because it is so elementary, absolutely no prerequisite required, and any dog can play. As I said, I take in many adult dogs for board and train who need, for example, name game, which you could play with a 7- or 8-week-old puppy.

Melissa Breau: If people wanted to take one of the more advanced classes, do they need that first class? Is it a prerequisite, or can they just take the one that they need, or what is your recommendation there?

Julie Daniels: When I taught Adolescent Sport Dog, I wanted very much for Puppy Genius or Baby Genius to be prerequisite material. It didn't work out that that was all that necessary because I ended up going back to those foundations as we needed to do them. So it worked out as a standalone class, and I don't think I would make it a prerequisite. But it's one of those classes — I feel the same way about my empowerment class — well, everybody ought to take it! But if, for some reason, you don't, I can make it work for you! So I'm not worried about it as a prerequisite, but it sure is good stuff for anyone.

Melissa Breau: Excellent. I think some people think, Oh, Baby Genius, my dog's no longer a baby, but like you said, it's still applicable, it's still good stuff, it's still foundation skills that every dog should have.

Julie Daniels: That's a good way to describe it. It's foundation.

Melissa Breau: I know we talked a little bit about building confidence earlier, and I know in the description for your shiny, new, shaping class you mention that it will focus on using shaping principles to build confidence and teamwork. So I wanted to ask you why it is that shaping is such a good tool for accomplishing those two things.

Julie Daniels: It's one good tool, obviously. It's not the only way to do things, we all know that, but it's one good tool for building confidence, specifically because shaping done well inspires the dog of any age — it can be any age dog — to offer a little bit more, to try a little bit more, to use the initiative that I spoke about earlier, to develop the curiosity and then use initiative.

What we're working toward when we build upon those things, we're working toward a measure of self-reliance, so we want the dog — and that's where confidence comes in — we're building the dog's ability to make a choice and to enjoy the consequences of this choice.

Every once in a while in life it's really important that the consequence teach the dog not to do that again. We let daily life do that. We let other dogs do that. We humans can use artful shaping to almost eliminate the need for a tough consequence to make it hard on the dog. We can become expert at noticing the tiny little elements of curiosity and initiative, and by rewarding those in specific ways, we can create more and more behaviors along that same line that strengthen the dog's ability to behave or perform in the way that we would like to see again.

So shaping is artful; yes, it's scientific — and we will go into the science — but really this shaping class is not as scientific as some other shaping class would be, because it is only using the principles of shaping, which are good, clean mechanics and keen observations — very, very important elementary skills for shaping practices, but we are only using those shaping practices in order to get to the good stuff, the bigger picture of curiosity, initiative, self-reliance, you know, eagerness to work, not just for correctness.

So that's how this class will run. One of the lectures — I'll just tease you — that will be one of the first lectures in Week 2, for example, is called, "When Did Silent Shaping Become Rigid Shaping?" Do you get what I mean?

Melissa Breau: Yes.

Julie Daniels: That's what I mean about you can be scientifically spot-on and not really be creating what you want in your dog.

Melissa Breau: That's an interesting lecture title, and that will hopefully be a really great thing for people to think about, even before they get a chance to read the lecture. I know in the description you also mention that a lot of your favorite confidence-building games are perfect for practicing shaping. What did you mean by that, and can you talk us through an example of how that works?

Julie Daniels: Oh gosh, I'd love to. Some of the games that we play in confidence-building classes, not just empowerment, but that's the big one that is well known in the Fenzi world. Empowerment uses many strange materials, and people will talk about they have a cardboard collection, they have a bubble wrap collection, they have a metal utensil collection. People talk about their bakeware collection. Some people actually cook with this stuff. We certainly don't.

I mean that kind of thing, interaction with things that pop underneath you, things that feel squishy and move underneath you, they're unstable, things that make noise, for example, metal noise is very big in obedience training and it's also very, very big in seesaw training.

We did a huge amount of work with noise making with metal, and we use noise tolerance, meaning someone else is making the noise and you don't have any say about it. That can be tough for some dogs and easy for others.

The other element of that is noise empowerment: what if I'm being invited to make the noise myself. I'm controlling it, I'm in charge of it, I learn what it sounds like, and now it's up to me whether I want to make that happen again and again.

So we create the dog's desire to be part of the environment in an active way. We want the dog to be an active participant in the experiences that he's going to have. That's about confidence and empowerment and such.

Shaping is the absolute best way to get those things, and you can well imagine that some puppies — or any dog; I'm saying puppy only because I'm teaching Baby Genius, but any dog is invited to play — you can imagine just that taking a closer look at a pile of bubble wrap and plastic on the floor is probably a clickable event for many, many dogs, whereas there would be other dogs who would actually inadvertently scare themselves by jumping in the pile knowing nothing about what is going to happen. That would be handler error. That would be a poor job of establishing operations for the shaping that we want to do. So it's much better for us to learn artful ways to observe what the dog is doing, what the dog is about to do sometimes, and to offer delivery of reinforcement in such a way that the dog is not going to be offended but is going to be curious about doing more and gradually more. So shaping being the practice of building successive approximations toward an end-goal behavior.

There are two ways that I make use of that. One is that I'm using end-goal behaviors that are not "world peace." If your dog jumps into a bin full of bubble wrap, good for you, but you didn't just earn a MACH. So I separate, in other words, the elements that we're working with from the real-world elements of competition, and to a certain extent remove them from daily life, and embrace the dog's ability to enjoy silly things. They're silly things, there's no doubt about it. But it doesn't take a big stretch to see that the dog's confidence with these silly things — if, again, we do a good job of generalizing and creating fluency for these skills — it doesn't take a big stretch to see their usefulness in the dog's daily life as he meets other things in the world. So that's what we're trying to do. We take silly games and we build, through good shaping practices, we build the dog's desire to interact with the novelty in the environment, and we build the dog's enjoyment of the surprises that could happen as a result of that. Does that make sense?

Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and I think there's a thread here that you've hinted at a little bit as we've gone through all the questions that's spot-on for everyone to ask you next, which is this idea that people, when they get into dog training, largely think dog training is about the dog, but the more involved they become, most of us realize that it's really at least half, if not three-quarters, about our own skills as a trainer. I wanted to ask how you balance teaching good handler mechanics with canine learning in the class and what aspects of handler skills you plan to talk about. Also, if you'd like to mention why they're so important, that would be awesome, especially when it comes to shaping.

Julie Daniels: In the shaping class we'll be talking first and foremost about the handler's job. As I was hinting at, it's our job to set up the scenario so that the dog can be successful. I just call that establishing operations. That's what I was trained to call it back in the 1970s. Establishing operations meaning by the time the dog sees the apparatus or the setup, you have created this little microenvironment — and you have a plan, by the way — so that you are able to build, bing, bing, bing, one success on top of another very quickly so that you're creating this curiosity and this initiative that you wanted to create.

For example, it would be a huge mistake to just crowd your dog into a busy place and say, "Hey, I happen to have some bubble wrap. I think I'll do a shaping game of squash the bubble wrap." But if the environment is absolutely wrong for that new skill, developing that new skill, it will not go well, and that is handler error.

It is our job, first and foremost, to set up the operation in such a way to invite success and know what the early steps are going to be, so that we can create, bing, bing, bing, reward, reward, reward, right, right again, bingo, what a genius, ta-da! That's the first order of business as trainers: we're going to be talking about how to establish operations in order to inspire success.

And then we'll be talking about how to … obviously the clicking part, but then how to deliver the reinforcement in such a way to invite another success or more behavior or just a repetition of the current behavior. So we'll be talking a whole lot about delivery, as well as about how to establish what we're trying to do. Both those things are important.

Melissa Breau: One of the things that I saw on your syllabus that I don't think we've ever really talked about here on the podcast before is this idea of delivery of reinforcement. I know we have a webinar coming up about that in a few weeks with another instructor, but I wanted to ask you about it anyway. How does delivery of reinforcement influence training, and how do you make those decisions?

Julie Daniels: I'm glad it is going to be. It's a webinar, it deserves its own webinar, it's really a very big part of the picture and can influence the success of the dog greatly.

Part of delivery of reinforcement is geared toward inviting the next rep. The very best example I can think about that is in Chicken Camp. Bob Bailey always says, "Click for behavior, feed for position," and he's talking about the artful way we move the cup of corn as the chicken is reaching forward and pecking with it.

The same thing happens in agility practices with foundation training. We're always moving the reward down the line. We want to be continuing forward toward the behavior that we're trying to create, because necessarily we've only got a tiny little piece of it. That's what shaping's all about. So we're trying to build the next step of the behavior, and using the reward delivery is one very, very effective means of inviting a next correct response. Would you like an example, Melissa?

Melissa Breau: Yes, please.

Julie Daniels: One good example would be — this isn't necessarily in the Baby Genius class, but it was just in the Canine Fitness class that I was doing with my own instructor, Karen Kay; I'm a student as well as a teacher — so I'm a student in Canine Fitness class, and we were shaping — not just luring, but we were shaping — a complete 360-degree turn on a wobbly surface, so it's very complex, and I was working with Kool-Aid.

Well, Kool-Aid already knows an outside turn, and she knows a spin, and she can certainly follow a lure around in a circle. So I could have gotten that done, probably most anybody could get it done, just by luring a circle with a cookie — can you imagine — and then feeding the cookie. Is that shaped? No, not at all. Have you helped create a behavior? Well, maybe. You don't really know. But your dog can indeed follow a cookie around in a circle. There's nothing wrong with that, so I'm not criticizing that.

But many of us would choose to do that, and I think it's better to choose to do that, through shaping practices. That would look just a little bit different. Even if you did decide to lure the initial turn of the head, you wouldn't just continue that cookie around in a circle. You would click for that initial head turn before the puppy even gets to the cookie. Then you would deliver that cookie, and as you deliver that cookie — this is the part we're talking about here — you're going to move it a couple or three inches further along the circle. See what I'm picturing? And then you're going to let go.

So what's going to happen? Well, you'd better click quickly, because what is going to happen — because you now have removed the lure — what is going to happen is the dog is going to turn around back toward you, and that is not the direction we want to go, is it? We're trying to lure a circle away from us.

So what you need to do instead is click before the dog turns back. Can you imagine how quick that is? You perhaps have less than a second in which to get that next click in, and now, Melissa, here's where it comes in again. Reward delivery is buying you the rest of the circle. In perhaps ten little increments around the circle, just as an estimate, you get ten repetitions of creating that puppy's turn around the circle. Instead of one continuous repetition, you get ten repetitions of the puppy learning to turn and move in that circular fashion. That's why shaping, in that one little tiny example, that's why shaping is superior to luring in a simple task like that. Sometimes it's hard to understand that. I'm really glad you brought up this question, and I'm sure it will come up in the webinar as well. It's difficult to help people understand that they actually should do it that way, because if you can picture in my example, it would have taken, oh, I don't know, two seconds perhaps, to lure the entire circle and then give the cookie, and it probably took, I don't know, ten seconds, fifteen seconds, it could possibly even have taken twenty seconds to do it the way I've just described.

So I'm hoping, I'm banking on the fact that people will consider the value of shaping as in long-term learning, instead of incidental reps here and there of a behavior, that shaping is more powerful long-term. So that's why I would suggest doing it the way I'm doing it. Shaping is better for long-term learning. It helps the dog offer behavior and learn from the consequences that he can offer more behavior. It just creates a dog who's stronger, more resilient, with a measure of self-reliance, learning to operate in the environment in cooperation with the human.

Melissa Breau: Not only that, but in the example you used, he gets maybe ten cookies instead of just one cookie because of the repetition of the behavior.

Julie Daniels: For sure. No small matter, that's right!

Melissa Breau: In the shaping class, what other skills or concepts are you planning to cover?

Julie Daniels: Well, let's see. We'll be doing a whole lot with empowerment-based behaviors. We'll also be doing a little bit with behaviors that will be useful in dog sports. For example, we will be shaping a tuck sit. But I also — this is a disclaimer for Baby Genius class and for shaping class too — we will use props. When we want the babies to learn a specific skill, we're going to use a prop to help them get these things right, because babies don't have the power.

In the shaping class, the dog may well have the power, but rather than use just pure shaping techniques to get what we want just in space, we'll use those props to hurry those behaviors along and to help the dog learn to initiate onto equipment.

It sounds like it's hard to wean from props, but it's not. If you don't wean from your lures — you know, the primary reinforcer being used as an enticement to behave — that is harder to wean from, if you don't do it early on. We'll be doing that part very early on. But props themselves are not difficult to wean from. Once we have established behaviors that have been created through the props, we'll put them on cue, and then weaning from the props is not difficult. So I'm not worried about that.

But we'll be using, in shaping class we'll be using things like platforms and sit targets and maybe some mats, but certainly target sticks. I love to use gear ties and expandable target sticks. We'll do raised targets and low targets, we'll do paw targets and nose targets, and sit targets and stand targets.

There's also room in that class — hopefully I've covered everybody's interests now — so we'll also have some room in that class to work on individual projects. I don't think there'll be any individual projects in the first three weeks of class. We'll all be geared toward the foundations, and some people and some dogs will be ahead of others, and that's no problem; I have plenty of material.

But I think in the last three weeks of class, this being a first-time class, I'm going to experiment. Can people go off on their own tangents, and I've said yes. Quite a few people have e-mailed me about this. One that has come up many times is that people saw that I was doing the concept of between, beginning in Week 1, and if you think about it, that is the basis for two-by-two weave pole training, so several people have already asked, "Can I use this class to shape weave pole performance?" And I've said, "Absolutely, yes."

This is a great use of shaping, and we are all going to cover the concept of going between two things. There are so many uses for that, not just in agility, but for the people who want to free-shape weave poles, this is a great class. It's a great class. But you'll have to be patient with me, because for the first three weeks we're all going to be working on these foundation skills relating to shaping, and we will be exposed to a lot of different kinds of elements. We're not just going to do between for six weeks, sorry.

So once you've gone through the basic empowerment-related and curiosity-related and skills-related behaviors that we'll be shaping — which also, by the way, will build your own expertise with the shaping process and the various ways to build an operation, to establish an operation, to run the operation, and to use reinforcement criteria and timing in effective ways — I figure that's about three solid weeks without doing too much else.

And then I'm hoping that Weeks 4, 5, and 6, people who have very specific individual agendas such as weave poles, such as, for example, drop on recalls, such as perfect front tuck sits, such as parallel path, there are so many good things, heeling, I don't really have a problem with that.

I think I'm going to experiment with letting people go off on their own individual tangents, and we'll see whether that works out well as a class or whether we actually need six full weeks just to work on the mechanics of shaping. I don't think we will, because this class is geared toward being an overview of good shaping practices and then taking those skills to our activities, whether it be a dog sport in specific or just daily life skills such as getting out in public and the like.

I feel like that's my best use of the class is to be able to help people do what they want to do. I'll tell you where I went with this …

Melissa Breau: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Julie Daniels: Through all along my good shaping practices, I've been gearing my young dog, Kool-Aid, toward being my seminar dog. So obviously she's going to have to have a myriad of skills. Agility is my sport, but shaping is one of the best and most fun things I do, and I've started another in-person shaping class just last week and I decided, OK, you're 2-and-a-half, little girl, how about you be my dog now?

So she is, in this class, my one and only demo dog. She is all by herself for the first time. She did not have her big brother there who's the expert and she's just the tagalong. No, she's now the seminar dog, and so for the first time I had a separate dog bed for her, and I put an x-pen around her because, again, I'm establishing an operation where she can be successful. If I just put her in the middle of the room on her dog bed, I don't even know all of the dogs that are coming into that class yet, that would be a very poor trainer's decision. So I protected her with an x-pen around the dog bed so that she could see everyone and they could see her, she could not get into trouble, and nobody could bother her.

But she has the opportunity to learn to raise and lower her arousal state according to whether she is on duty or off duty. That's a really good life challenge that can be built through shaping, which is what I did with this dog. She's an extremely busy dog, and she, her whole life, has wanted all the turns. So for her now to say, OK, I'm back on the dog bed with a bone, and all the other dogs in class are going to be working this, that's tough for her. But you know what? She truly behaved like an old pro.

These students, most of them know me, and they know this dog, and they were impressed by what she could do. I think if they didn't know me and I had told them that this is my demo dog and she's been doing this work for a year or so, they would absolutely have believed it. She just did a great job, and it's because she knows how to raise and then lower her arousal state.

By the way, we'll start this work in Baby Genius. It's not just all about "Yay, yay, yay, the people are coming." And I am a person who allows baby dogs to say, "Yay, yay, yay, the people are coming." I truly allow my baby dogs to be pretty much a happy nuisance around people, because I do err on the side of life happiness and attraction for people and the world in general, like we were talking about earlier.

So that means I've got a lot of training to do to get from that as, for example, a 6-month-old to now a 2-and-a-half-year-old who's already my seminar dog. That's a lot of training, but it's all been done through dog's choice training and through good shaping practices.

So the end-goal behaviors that I want are broken down very finely into manageable steps for this particular dog, so that now I have a dog who looks fully … she's not fully trained, right? But she looks really good in a crowd when she's working on behaviors that I have built through shaping.

So even though she had never been in this crowded an environment all by herself being the only teacher's dog there, she was able to come in and out of demo mode. She was able to raise her arousal state and then lower her arousal state each time she went back in the pen. I know I'm biased, but I don't believe she complained even once.

Melissa Breau: That's awesome.

Julie Daniels: Yeah, she really had it down about how to behave. I think that's part of shaping good behavior rather than coercing good behavior either through commands and corrections or just through pressure, pressure, pressure.

This dog wasn't trained with pressure. When I wanted to demonstrate down on a mat, I just let her out of her little pen and I just — with a flourish, because that's the cue — flourished the mat and laid it out for her, and she ran, not walked, and threw herself down. And so then I told the class — this is true, so you'll learn this too, if you take the class — that she's never been commanded to lie down on the mat. Never. She was shaped.

And any of the students who've taken, for example, cookie jar games, we build mat work from scratch. In the fall I'll actually be teaching a class specifically dedicated toward all these targets, including mats and platforms and sit targets and the like. But just to be honest, this dog was a hundred percent shaped to lie down on a mat. She was never coerced. And that down could not be more reliable.

Melissa Breau: That's awesome.

Julie Daniels: That's the value of shaping.

Melissa Breau: Hopefully, students have their wheels turning a little bit and they're trying to decide whether either of these classes is appropriate for their dog. Do you have any advice for those people trying to make their class selection or decide if they should sign up? What's appropriate, what's not appropriate, how should they make those decisions?

Julie Daniels: I think if a person has already taken one of the foundation shaping classes that have already been offered, then I think you probably already have the background that I'll be covering in the first three weeks. I'm sure my spin is a little bit different, but the good practices are the good practices, and so you could pretty much move on to another more skills-based class. Baby Genius, as I said, is good for all dogs, but it's extremely foundation-oriented. There's a good deal of background classical conditioning in there, a good deal of operant conditioning in there, a little bit about shaping just because that's the way I do things, but it's more geared toward all the elements of living with humans as a young dog.

One wonderful thing that Fenzi does now is put up the sample lectures. I do think that's a wonderful way to get a feel for how a class will be run and what sorts of things the teacher concentrates on.

Obviously it's only one little tiny lecture. Baby Genius, for example, has about sixty lectures in it, and I use forty of them in any class, so I try to make the class different every time through, and the Gold level students, I think in any class, cause the class to develop in a different way, so it's never the same class twice. That is definitely the case in Baby Genius, and all dogs are invited to come look at first-level foundation skills.

My shaping class is definitely a fundamental shaping class. There's nothing advanced about it. It's the specifics, the basics, and the groundwork of shaping, and my take on it is to put it to use immediately in real-world elements.

Melissa Breau: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Julie!

Julie Daniels: Thanks!

Melissa Breau: As per usual, it's been awesome … and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in!

We'll be back next week with Dr. Jessica Hekman to talk about the biology of building a great performance dog, so it should be a good interview.

If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Credits:

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.