10/20/2026
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The myth of Luring:
"Lured behaviour is weaker than Shaped behaviour".
This statement is something you'll hear some trainers say. They'll scoff at luring and use shaping instead, claiming that a shaped behaviour is stronger.
And at first glance, it may be.
But first, what is luring - and shaping?
In luring, or baiting, the animal follows the food, and the food is moved in such a way as to produce the behaviour.
In shaping, the animal volunteers behaviour, and the trainer selects a starting point within the range of what the animal is offering, and then gradually changes the criterion for reinforcement. As the critierion changes, so does the behavioural variation that the trainer chooses the next criterion from.
Lure a dog to enter a crate by showing him the food, and moving the food into the crate. Then gradually fade the lure so that it doesn't appear until he's walked into the crate on his own.
Or shape him by rewarding him for taking one step towards the crate, then two, then four, then entering the crate with the front feet, etc, until he's walked into the crate on his own.
There are pros and cons to luring versus shaping:
- luring is typically quicker than shaping
- when recently learned, lured behaviour is typically more sensitive to extinction than recently learned shaped behaviour. In other words, the animal is more likely to forget what he was doing that earned the reward.
And now, enter the myth: "lured behaviour is weaker than shaped behaviour".
This myth assumes that the second statement is true also for well-established behaviour.
And it's not.
The reason why recently learned lured behaviour is sensitive to extinction is that it has no reinforcement history. In other words, the animal has learned in just a few repetitions that a certain behaviour produces good outcomes.
When shaping, the process takes time as the behaviour is built gradually in small increments. So by the time the animal has learned the final behaviour, he's had tons of repetitions of being reinforced for offering previous versions of the behaviour in this particular context. So with regards to the recently learned shaped behaviour, the animal has a pretty good hunch what he needs to do to get the goodies.
In other words, if you lure a behaviour, say 3 times to get the final behaviour, and then repeat the finished behaviour 20 times, that behaviour should be at least as solid as the shaped behaviour repeated 20 times, once reinforcement history is built.
And indeed, since out of the 23 behaviours that the lured animal has been reinforced for, 20 of those behaviours were exactly what you wanted, that animal is very likely to offer exactly what you want. Once learned and established, lured behaviour has precision (but as far as I know is best suited to gross body movement).
In contrast, say we used 20 reinforcers to shape the same behaviour, and then another 20 to repeat the finalized behaviour to reach some level of fluency. The shaped animal is likely to keep offering previous iterations of the shaped behaviour, since he's only been reinforced for exactly what you wanted 50% of the time (20 out of 40 reinforcers were for the final behaviour).
For sure, there are other problems with luring, but that it's "weaker" than shaping is not one of them.
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This topic is covered in the Getting Behaviour module of the course Getting Behaviour – the Foundations of Animal Training.
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