Trick questions

So tonight we worked on a couple things. With Mia I am working on her picking something up on command. she will go get her ball on command but nothing else. So we got a chew and I started with her targetting it. Then I held it and she mouthed it. Kept working that till she was pulling on the chew pretty good. Held it close to the ground and she would come up and pull on it. Finally moved my hand out of the way and she's picking it up then dropping it. Was that the way to go about that? I was thinking duration would be the next step.

And then I decided to just do nothing in particular with Summer. I started clicking head turns but she scratched her eye a couple times with her paw so I clicked those. The lightbulbs coming on were very funny. You could see her trying to figure out what it was about her foot that I wanted her to do. Anyways, now she is fairly consistently taking her right paw and putting it by her nose/eye. I'm trying to think of a good word to put it to. Any ideas?

Yup! Perfect, duration would be the next thing. I also add my hand into the picture around this point, just making it really easy for them to drop it in my hand.

Shame on you! <---- not on you. but that's what I'd call it.

You know, I don't think I've done much capturing at all. I usually shape or lure. I tried capturing Summer's licking since she does it so much . But I think it's involuntary. She never seems to know she's doing it. It took Summer a little bit to figure out what she was getting clicked for. But now I'm eager to try to capture more behaviors!

I like 'shame on you', that's cute.

I love capturing... I captured this crazy head toss thing that Zinga was doing when I first got her... eventually shaped it into a roller over and a spin, but she still offers that dang head toss as a default! I always joke that it looks like she has some form of teret's going on, especially now that she offers a hind leg kick too.

Funny, I was just having the same 'issue' with Jackson. I've been trying to teach him to hold things for longer durations. He's very good at... if I point to something and tell him to get it, and then point to a basket, he will put it in there. He gets that. But if I just want him to hold something (i.e. posing for a picture with a flag in his mouth, or something)... he just... doesn't get it. He won't do it for more than, like, 3 seconds.

However, when he's trying to get my attention or if he's bored, he will pick up the most random things (like the other day it was a big plastic thing from a Barbie package) and he was just standing there staring at me holding this big ol' hunk of plastic in his mouth for like over a minute lol. I was wishing the clicker was near me so I could've clicked it. I'm considering trying to capture that since he does it fairly often.

But yeah I've essentially been doing what you have... still to no luck though with 'holding'.

The way I did it was legitimately to teach Kimma that she doesn't get the marker/reward until I take the item from her. Before that, she also was able to retrieve objects, but then she would immediately drop whatever it was at my feet or in my hand if that was there. So retraining it all was what we had to do LOL. It took a few weeks to get the basics of it down, and I still work on it for distractions/duration, as she's still iffy outside/in other locations (it takes her a second to "remember" what to do).