Newsflash: Your dog already knows how to sit! But he may not know the cue you want to associate with that behavior. Annie breaks down how to use the "capturing" technique to teach "sit" anew and to add a novel cue. She covers:
 -The downsides of "luring" a behavior or "molding" it
 -The trap of trying to teach a behavior by asking for it repeatedly 
 -The difference between a "cue" and a "command"
 -How to add a cue
 -The never-ending process of "shaping" a behavior
 -How to fade a lure and turn it into a cue

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Partial Transcript:
Annie:
Hey everyone. I am so glad you are here. Today we are going to talk about how to teach a dog to sit and whether or not your dog already knows how to sit. We're going to start from scratch. You can always start from scratch. And of course if your dog does already know how to sit he or she might not know, however, the word or whatever cue you have attached to that behavior.
So rather than use the word “sit,” which I think if you've tried to teach your dog to sit before, if you have taught your dog to sit before, that's probably the cue you've used, we are going to use a new cue, just for the sake of showing how to teach something totally from scratch. The cue we're going to use is either going to be a finger snap or a hand clap. I usually do two.
But before I get into the details of how to teach this behavior, I want to talk about some of the common ways sit is taught and I'll talk about some of the pros and cons of using these methods. And then we will go over how we teach it at School for the Dogs.

Now, I think probably the most traditional way of teaching “sit” is basically just to say the word sit until your dog sits and then praise your dog, kind of like the word “sit” is eliciting the “sit” from the dog. I've heard this called the midwife approach as you are pulling the sit out of the dog. And in reality, two things tend to happen. One, usually people start saying it and then they repeat it and then they do kind of like something with their body to kind of try and help the dog, whether it's leaning or holding their hand over the dog's head, or even pushing the dog's butt down, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a minute. Or they just keep repeating it until the dog sort of gets frustrated and tries to do something. And when you think about it as kind of actually teaching, using negative reinforcement, the behavior that you want to happen, “sit,” is encouraged because it makes the annoying person who keeps saying “sit, sit, sit,” it makes them stop.

Again, negative reinforcement is just another way of encouraging a behavior, but it's encouraging a behavior by making the behavior be the off switch that makes the annoying thing go away, as opposed to positive reinforcement, which is a behavior is encouraged because it produces something good. Now, if these methods of teaching “sit” have persisted for generations and generations, I think it's just because dogs are so forgiving and tend to pick things up pretty quickly.

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts/

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