How to Teach a Pet

1. Choose your subject. You could pick any household pet, such as mouse, a parrot or a dog. Let's say you want to teach your Labrador dog, Cookie, a new trick.
2. Choose a reinforcer. Food is usually the easiest to use. For food to be reinforcing, Cookie has to be hungry. So don't try to teach him right after he has eaten.
3. Since reinforcement is most effective when given almost simultaneously with the desired behavior, and since it's hard to hand out food as quickly as you would like to, develop a conditioned reinforcer by pairing the food with something else. That something might be one of those little metal toys that make a "cricket" sound when you click them.
4. When Cookie goes to the food place whenever you sound the cricket, you are ready to begin teaching.
5. Choose the behavior you want to teach. One relatively simple trick, good as a starter, is getting Cookie to touch the handle on a low cupboard with his nose.
6. Shape Cookie's behavior by reinforcing anything that remotely resembles the behavior you want. First, reinforce any turn toward the cupboard. Then reinforce any move toward the cupboard, reinforce any movement from his head that brings his nose close to the cupboard handle. Every time you reinforce one of these successive approximations to the target behavior, sound the cricket as nearly simultaneously with Cookie's movement as possible, then give him a piece of food. During the teaching, do not touch Cookie, talk to him, coax him, or in any other way divert his attention from the task at hand.
7. Before you teach Cookie another trick, extinguish this one by no longer reinforcing it. Eventually Cookie will stop touching his nose to the cupboard handle and will be ready to learn something new.