“Shaping the AKC Obedience and Rally Exercises: The Foundation” is an in-depth science-based force-free method for building a strong foundation for the AKC Obedience and Rally exercises. It can be used to train puppies to become well-mannered stable family pets, to build a foundation for therapy or service dog work, or to build a foundation for any other dog sport.
The primary goal for the foundational exercises taught in this book is producing internal qualities in family pets and working dogs. A side effect of our focus on building dogs up from the inside out is good behavior. Teaching a dog to “sit”, to “down”, to stay in the down position, to find heel position, and to move in heel position are ideal places to build a strong foundation for any dog for any venue. The process of teaching these behaviors creates huge amounts of self-control, confidence, focus, resilience, and love of working with and pleasing a person.
This book is a deep dive into how to best utilize the most important 5-20 minutes of a puppy or dog’s day: the training session. It is during the training session that the trainer has the opportunity for in-depth reinforcement for those behaviors that a trainer wants from his dog so that those things will become habit and be integrated into the dog’s daily life.
The training methods we present make heavy use of a powerful dog training tool called shaping. When shaping is used, a dog plays an active roll in learning as he uses his own brain to figure out what it is that will bring him his reward. With shaping, a handler builds his dog’s behavioral skills layer upon layer as the dog figures out one by one the various pieces of a desired behavior. The dog learns one step at a time.
The method presented in this book is heavily based on setting puppies and dogs up for success, shaping and reinforcing correct behavior, and motivating the dog to work for us. We turn every training session into a game that dogs love to play. Puppies and dogs beg us to play this training game and it can be used throughout the dog’s life.
Dogs of all ages do incredibly well with this program. We’ve started over 150 puppies with the method taught in this book when they were barely 6 weeks of age. Adult dogs at all stages of training can also benefit.
The type of shaping that we use is commonly referred to as either “Free Shaping” or “Shaping by Successive Approximations”. In summary, this method of shaping is a means for gradually teaching a dog a new behavior by waiting for the dog to use his own brain to figure out various pieces of the behavior.
Shaping is a tool that is much more commonly used in agility training than in competitive obedience. If you’ve used shaping in agility, you will notice as you move through this program that we’ve changed a few aspects of how we apply shaping to various exercises.
Sometimes, we limit the number of choices available to the dog. Limiting choices makes the process easier in the initial training stages and more efficient during the later stages of training particular behaviors. Sometimes, we’ll add in other positive reinforcement training tools to jump start the process. During other times, we’ll combine cues for behaviors dogs have already learned with shaping in order to improve or perfect those behaviors.
As we work through this program, we’ll talk about how to enhance training by combining shaping with other tools. Shaping is our primary tool, but we support this most powerful of all tools with [also use] other training techniques when needed.
Puppies do extremely well with shaping. We’ve used it to train puppies with a wide range of temperaments to perform down/stays and to heel off leash with incredible focus. These puppies were started with shaping the day after they turned 6 weeks of age while still with the litter. You can see many videos of very young puppies heeling and doing down/stays as we demonstrate the foundational exercises of this program.
Shaping is an especially helpful tool for dogs who lack either confidence, resilience, motivation, focus, or self-control. Building these internal qualities are key to having a competitive obedience dog as well as a well-mannered balanced family pet. This program focuses on building puppies and dogs up using time-tested proven scientific principles.
As mentioned, the Shaping Game discussed in this program is game-based and fun. At the same time, it is structured and science-based. Because of the large amount of science behind this method, we’ve devoted an entire section of the book to discussing the foundational principles and techniques. We are big believers in the idea that knowledge is power and that understanding the “Why’s” is important in order to properly execute the “How’s”.
The program is heavily rooted in marker training, shaping, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning. These scientific principles and techniques are the foundation upon which shaping is built. Without them, shaping would not be possible. This book has in-depth chapters on all of these topics. We will make use of and discuss the many other tools available when their use is beneficial and consistent with our philosophy of training.
We only use two quadrants of operant conditioning: positive reinforcement and negative punishment. Negative punishment is simply the withholding of rewards. This program does not recommend techniques that cause physical pain to a dog.
Not only have we trained a large number of puppies and pets, we’ve also used this program with a wide varieties of breeds. I (Karen) have also had considerable success in competitive obedience.
In regular obedience, I’ve earned two OTCH’s (Obedience Trial Champion), UD titles on four dogs, over a dozen High in Trial awards (highest scoring dog in the whole trial) and over a dozen High Combined awards (highest combined score out of the two classes where you compete for championship points). One of these high combined awards was at the 2023 Southeastern Regional Championship. I’ve qualified dogs three times for the Westminster Masters Obedience championship, and once for the National Obedience Championship, not to mention qualifications on numerous dogs for the Obedience Classic.
In AKC Rally Obedience, I’ve earned five RACH’s (Rally Obedience Champion), over 50 High Combined awards, over 50 Triple High Combined awards and a seventh place in the championship class at the 2024 Rally National Competition where there were over 800 dogs competing.
Most importantly and what I’m most proud of is the happy working attitude in my dogs in spite of the fact that none of my dogs have been by nature the high drive confident dogs that typically do well in competitive obedience. I’ve built a love of working with a person and vastly increased the confidence, self-control, and resilience in over a dozen competitive obedience or rally dogs. I’ve done the same (though at a lower level) in over 150 puppies under three months of age using the principles found in this book.
A Strong Foundation
This training method builds a strong wide foundation which means that a proportionately large percent of time is spent on the early stages where a handler may not feel like much progress is being made. Obvious outward progress may not be visible for longer than most programs. We encourage trainers to be patient. This strong foundation, once built and solid, will prove its worth when new more complicated behaviors come much easier, faster, and more reliable later on.
Handlers tend to want to move forward in training far too fast. We believe in perfecting the smallest pieces of exercises before putting it all together. We encourage training at a level low enough to keep a dog successful.
Advancing more quickly than we recommend may initially look appealing. However, without a strong foundation, behaviors will begin failing. As behaviors fail, handlers look for ways to fix, correct, or patch up the problem. Often times, the dog is blamed.
With our system, we don’t blame the dog. We see failure as an opportunity to reevaluate our training. A dog’s failure is always viewed as our cue that a piece of the foundation wasn’t built properly or that a behavior hasn’t been reinforced enough in the early stages. Instead of patching the problem in the outward behavior, we go back and fix the foundation. There are many layers of learning and each layer must be built in turn without skipping prerequisite layers.
Because of the large amount of information needed to build a strong foundation, there are many training principles and techniques to learn initially. However, once the trainer understands the rules of the game and how to build the foundation, those same rules will apply for training the dog for life. Training becomes easy and fast once the foundation is solid!
