Capturing a Singer….

Wait, that title might not sound exactly right. I do not mean literally going out and capturing a singer like a pokemon where we gotta catch them all.

But on second thought, that would be kinda cool too.

What i really mean is “capturing”, as in a type of training in which you wait on a dog to offer perfectly natural behavior on their own, and then you reward/reinforce that wanted behavior with something good/wanted, usually high value food.

I’m lazy with dog training, because life is busy enough and i would rather play or sleep or do anything else other than boring repetition type stuff. The thing is though that ive learned my singer is lazy at dog training too. He would rather not waste time doing boring repetition type cue/command/behavior type stuff either. He has plenty of other chaos to rain down on the world. Lots and lots to see and do for a vibrant young NGSD you should know.

Capturing works for us because we realized early on that our NGSD is super clever enough to learn very fast to repeat what works for him in his daily life.

That means, if he can score a piece of chicken off a counter, the behavior of jumping up on the counter was immediately reinforced with that chicken. SCORE for singer!! hes going to try that again, maybe a few hundred times. If he scores something else well, you might as well understand now that experience and those reinforcements are forever etched into his brain. They worked!!

I dont know about you but my motto is “work smarter so we dont have to work harder”, so capturing for an NGSD works well for both human and dog. I get to effectively teach him how to thrive/live in our human world and he thinks hes clever to figure out stuff that gets him chicken. Its easy enough for me to add a “cue/command” word to the behavior.

This method works so well for a NGSD because their brains are open to learning and curiosity, they want to figure things out and that alone is extremely self reinforcing. Mine was so amazed when he realized that without a word from me, any time his paw touched a mat on my kitchen floor, he got a piece of chicken. Guess how we trained mat placing when im cooking in a very humane and fun way? Yes you guessed it! My singer loves to run and sit on a foam rug in my kitchen when i cook. I started the mat out in the middle of the floor so he had no choice but to inadvertently step on it, and when he did i would put a “YES GOOD BOY!” to the behavior and give him a piece of what i was cooking. NGSD mind was like “yes, this is fun”.

Well, that was all it took for him to learn very fast that roaming around the kitchen didn’t get him any food, but placing on that mat…..CHICKEN!!!!

Same with “sit”, same with “wait”, same with going to the door to go outside for potty, same with sitting in a carseat in the car, same with singing and much much more. Capturing is an effective way to have fun with a NGSD, to teach them behaviors in a natural way, and to show them how to live in our world, a world that can be tough on them when we don’t show them what we want from them.

Most primitive dogs in general really thrive with positive reinforcement training, and almost all thrive and response well to fun methods such as shaping and capturing. We can setup environments like putting a dog bed in a spot they lay in and then slowly moving it after theyve learned laying there gets them reinforcement. Singers are in fact extremely eager to work with you and have fun, if we are willing to work with them and also have fun! They are capable of learning anything with positive reinforcement, and especially with focus on capturing.