Your dog is the coolest canine on the block. Whether your pooch is 7 weeks or 17 years old, has competition obedience titles or has never had any training at all, he can learn cool tricks and enjoy performing them too. He'll love the structured, fun interaction with you and will get both mental and physical exercise, which can help him behave better overall.

Shaping allows you to create behavior from scratch without physical control or corrections, but rather by drawing on your animal's natural ability to learn. Shaping basically is a practice used building a particular behavior by using a series of small steps to achieve it.

Shaping is a training method in which the trainer is an observer rather than an active participant in the learning. By observing behaviors, clicking, and rewarding approximations of the wanted final behavior, we can gradually get the dog to learn a new behavior completely on his/her own.

When it comes to teaching a dog new behavior you have several options. You can capture, lure or shape. You can also move the dogs into the desired position or punish the dog when it’s NOT doing the desired behavior (making the correct behavior pleasant because of the lack of discomfort/pain).

Use bite-sized treats or the dog's regular kibble to reward the individual training steps at first.

Dogs' ability to hold the success in their minds during eating gets stronger as the reinforcement history increases. The more they get reinforced for touching the brick, the quicker they return to it after eating.

Start by rewarding or sometimes luring a behavior that may look very different from your goal behavior. Then when the dog's good at that step, you'll start rewarding behaviors that are closer and closer to your goal behavior.

It is fact that hundreds of dog behaviors are mini versions of larger behaviors. Miniscule behaviors allow us to change direction or develop at a different pace; the ability to freeze the small behaviors allows the learner to listen with greater precision.

Once the final step is learned train the cue word so that it becomes reliable.

As an added step we can switch to other rewards besides food and we can train the pet to repeat the trick multiple times in succession without needing a reward of any kind each time.

Body Parts shaping helps your dog learn to offer behavior, and it also helps you realize how precise this process can be for shaping the tiniest of movements. Shaping is great for encouraging a dog who is somewhat shut down to offer behaviors, because he can’t be wrong. Anything he does that even remotely relates to the exercise gets clicked and treated.