We have not posted a trick in a long time....geneally around here we have been doing a lot of foundation and getting ready for a lot more AGILITY training now that Cricket is a year old. I wanted to post a video of one of our favorite games to do while we are watching tv. I had the BEST video all ready to go and I am still learning the new editing program and it erased my video, and I had erased the footage off the camera, boo hooo!!! Soooo we had to rerecord this and Cricket was a little more tired. I could have waited to do it another day...but that would have been too easy, LOL!
I trained this by back chaining--so I...
1. Shaped Cricket to look at the bucket-which took ten seconds...maybe..
2. put a toy in the bottom of the bucket and shaped her to touch the ball with her mouth in any way. TREATS WENT IN THE BUCKET.
3. Click and Treat for mouthing and then picking up the toy.
4. As she picked up the toy I click and treated which actually made the ball fall back into the bucket....exactly what I was looking for. This was the first step I took a little more time with, I wanted her to really practice the ball falling into the bucket.
5. I held the toy at the edge of the bucket and she would grab it and let it fall into the bucket.
6. Now there was a lot of reinforcement for the toy falling into the bucket. I had delivered all the treats at the bottom of the bucket, just dropped them in so she would really get used to dipping her head in the bucket....so when I put the toy on the ground right next to the bucket she quickly figured out how to get that toy dropping back into the bucket.
7. Pretty quickly add in a second toy, start right from the start but it should go really fast.
8. I think it is pretty important to add in at least a couple of toys right away so the trick gets generalized.