The concept of operant behavior comes from the academic behavioral sciences and is now widely applied in the training of animals of all kinds, including humans.  The scientist who formally defined, studied, and established this concept is B.F. Skinner, who spent most of his academic career at Harvard University.  To read about this concept in this expert's own words, visit the B.F. Skinner Foundation web site, which is subtitled "Better behavior for a more humane world."   Karen Pryor, who studied with Skinner, is the person most familiar to dog trainers for bringing this concept to us.  If you have not already, you absolutely need to read her book "Don't Shoot the Dog" and you will find subscribing to her newsletter to be very helpful in keeping up on the latest advances in this field.  To find her book and read her newsletter, visit her website: http://www.clickertraining.com.

The B.F. Skinner Foundation's characterization of operant behavior is precisely why we are using it exclusively to train dogs to do the sport of agility,   You will find that you simply cannot MAKE a dog to agility.  The dog has to WANT to do it.  The concept of operant behavior as stated by Skinner explains it completely and simply:  Behavior is affected by its consequences.  Consequences that the dog desires reinforce the behavior, making that behavior stronger and more likely to be repeated.  Humans shape behaviors of dogs by applying those consequences to the dog for behaviors it performs in front of the human.  Traditional dog training uses a mixture of rewards and punishments for shaping a dog's behavior.  Most of us for many years trained our dogs by taking away punishments when the dog performed the behavior we wanted.  That's called negative reinforcement and the punishments we used in dog training were tastefully called "corrections."  You can read more about the definitions of all these terms in the behavioral sciences on another page of this web site.

In dog agility, we use only positive reinforcement, negative punishment and extinction to train our dogs.  In fact, dogs can thank the sport of dog agility for causing this more humane way to train them to spread like wildfire among the dog owning community.  Because dogs have to think for themselves and figure everything out and they have to WANT to do agility,  the R+ quadrant of operant training is the only way to train a dog to do agility at the highest levels of skill.   So that's what the agility foundation class is all about.  You not only learn how to train your dog in the foundation skills of agility, you will learn an exciting and rewarding and ultimately the most humane way to interact with and communicate with your dog.