Shaping "tap"

The other day I knew Gimme needed a bit of training and also knew I wasn't really in the mood to review our training notebook and work out a plan of what to train.  So decided to just free shape for creativity and see what came up.

The way I do that is to basically click/treat whatever Gimme offers me.  Of course, she likes to run the show, so tends to settle into repeating things she knows, to MAKE me click/treat.  When that happens I stop clicking whatever behavior she is repeating.  She quickly offers something else.

We got to a behavior where she was sitting in front of me and moving her front feet, up and down, basically tap dancing in place.  Because she was sitting in front of me, I had some concern that free shaping a sitting tap dance might pollute our obedience front.  So I turned it into a standing tap dance.

The behavior I want is for her to stand in one place and lift her feet up, noticeably high, alternating feet.  I don't want side-to-side or forward or back motion.  A little bit of side-to-side is just going to happen, but I want the main action to be up and down.  For the final "tap" behavior, I want it either in "hip" (standing heel), "thigh" (standing off-side heel), or "center" (standing front) position.

I was having real difficulty getting her to not lift and step backward.  She'd have the backward motion in mind, so even though I was clicking the lift, the treat was coming after the motion.   Thus it was getting rewarded too.  If I could see her whole body, I could predict when a lift would involve forward/back motion and not click, but I'm concentrating on her feet to click the best lifts, so can't see the motion tip offs.

During one of Gimme's bark fests - which happen whenever she thinks I'm missing good clicking opportunities... while I was taking a break to wait out her yelling, it occurred to me to use jackpots to strengthen the behaviors I DO want and the behaviors that are rewarded with a single treat will diminish.  That way I can click anything that is close to what I want and use the treat to give her qualitative information.  I know the big names in dog training say that jackpots don't work, but I think they've never worked with a really smart dog.  Gimme totally understands the jackpot concept and when she gets them, she works very hard to figure out what behavior pays better. 

Toward the end of our session, I was starting to be more selective about the height of lift I would reward with a jackpot.  Its tricky, because I don't want it to look like she is pawing forward - rather more like a hackney trot in place.  She actually started lifting and holding it there ever so briefly on her own.  Then when she thought I wasn't paying well enough (cuz I didn't jackpot a couple), she'd hold and sort of jiggle her foot.  It was so damn cute, I captured that with a couple super jackpots and ran out of treats.  If I can get that consistently, it would be perfect.

Next time we'll work on getting that with the left foot too.  She will do alternate lifts, left and right several times for a click.  But the best action was coming with her right foot. 

She's sound asleep now.