About 67% of all US households have some sort of pet, whether it be a dog, cat, fish, or even a lizard. Out of these 85 million families sustaining animals, for about 12 years now, I have been included within this percentile. In my particular case, I have had two dogs, both Golden Retrievers, and like many have trained them in certain ways to perform special tasks. It starts out with name recognition, then housetraining, and any others that one might want to follow through with like sitting, laying down, or rolling over. For any pet owners out there, we all know this is not an easy task and requires immense amounts of patience and repetition. One way to make something like this easier for both the owner and the dog is a type of operant conditioning we learned about called shaping. The idea of shaping first came from B.F. Skinner who discovered this phenomenon while expanding upon Edward Thorndike’s view on operant conditioning. Shaping offers an easier way to teach animals to act as a desired behavior through a method of positive reinforcement of behavior patterns. This term can also be called successive approximation and has been known to train animals to discriminate many types of objects and events. Skinner tested this theory on rats by breaking down behaviors into small, achievable steps in order to get them to press a lever to release food. Skinner would reward the rats for each step closer to the desired behavior, even if it meant them just slightly getting closer to the lever. By using this method of operant conditioning, Skinner trained the rats to perform proper behavior while deterring improper behavior.
Just like Skinner did with his rats, I used the same method of shaping on my dogs to teach them proper behavior. The main tasks my family and I would focus when training them were talents like sitting, laying down, and rolling over, as well as normal operations like, housetraining. For the talents, I started with teaching my dogs to sit by pushing their behind to the ground while saying the word “sit”. I would do this a couple times before rewarding them with a treat. This became a repetitive process for a couple days until they finally got a hang of it and it became instinct for them. After this, I proceeded with the same actions to teach them how to lay down. I would start out with saying “sit” in which they would sit to make sure the behavior is instilled in them and then repeated the previous process. I would physically push them to the ground multiple times, without causing any harm don’t worry, and then reward with a treat. Once again, I repeated this for a couple days and then used the same process for rolling over until all three activities were implanted within their minds and they could perform them without the retrieval of any treats. As well, I used the same system of treats for housetraining. Whenever they would go to the bathroom in the house, no treat was rewarded and we would occasionally yell at them, but if they went to the bathroom outside, a treat was rewarded. Both dogs eventually began waiting by the front door whenever they would have to go to the bathroom and then expected a treat afterwards. The desired behavior became so repetitive that both dogs could be let outside alone, with no leash, and would wait by the door until let in expecting a treat in the end. Even though this may not be successful in all cases of animals or dogs, it was quite fascinating to me how this worked so well for my dogs that we could trust them outside with no leash or electric fence with no worries.
References
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/operant-conditioning/
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-pet-statistics
