Foot Lift, Last Session: Stimulus Control

We started this about seven days ago, and followed the training plan very closely. The biggest change was this session.... I changed the foot lift cue to something other than our general 'pick up your foot' cue, which wasn't really formally trained but has apparently had enough reinforcement for small lifts that he only gave the large lifts after multiple repetitions.

Watching the video, I noticed that Griffin was sliding a lot...we'll bring in our foam tiles for future training!

This went WAY faster than I expected, I thought it would take a lot longer to get duration and the discrimination between foot up and foot on the floor... It could get stronger with more practice, but it's not a behavior we really need to work on.

Hmm... what to do next.....

Front Leg Lift: Duration and Cue: Video

Session 5, we added more duration and started to add a cue.

Adorable! I switched to just feeding throughout leg lifts and to stop the feeding after his leg hit the ground.

It was interesting to see a few times where Griffin would pick up his right foot (never in the other sessions!)

After we had several long points of duration, we started adding a cue.

I kept his "foot" cue for lifting the foot and "Sit" for foot back on the ground. Skip to about 1 min to see that.

I'm not sure if that's the best choice, maybe foot on the ground needs a more specific cue, but at the same time, I want Sit to mean "both front feet on the ground" in addition to the rest of the position.

Yes...I was a bad trainer and repeated cues. Ahem.