So does anyone have any experience/tips on how teach a dog to target with their back feet?

I've been working with Woozle on this for a couple sessions now (free shaping as much as possible) and he is still very confused. He knows it has something to do with targeting and something to do with his feet, but he figured those parts out in the first 5 seconds and hasn't made any real progress since then.
This is only alarming because everything else I have tried to teach he has had pretty solidly by now . He has targeting with his front feet down pat and I think that is part of the problem. I started out with the same target object (water bowl), but switched to a large square lid when it was obvious he was totally fixated on his front feet.

These are my first adventures in the world of free shaping and it's really been fun so far.

Teach him to back up independent of a contact. Once the backup is solid the have him back up to a contact point. When he hits it, mark and reward. Use a different command for the back feet.
On another forum I saw a dog that it's owner taught it to walk up a wall with it's back feet. She started by getting the dog to touch the contact with it's back feet and sloooly raised the "contact board.
Backup first THEN put a contact with it!

Cool idea! He already knows how to backup. It's his favorite trick. I'll try that today. He's only 17wks old, so a lot of the "stuff" I'm doing is really just imprinting with no words attached, but he's super smart, so he usually figures out what I want pretty quickly.

Those fence-walking, hand-standing dogs were kinda the inspiration behind the idea No idea if it will ever be super useful, but who knows?

I'll get back to you on how it works...

Walking backwards up the stairs really seemed to cement the idea of hind end awareness for Kenzi. With stairs she kept *looking* for the next step with her hind feet.

What command do you guys use, eventually, for back feet targeting?
I use "target" for the front feet, and "back" for backing up... ideas?

This is an exercise I have been playing around with a bit, too, and I have been drawing a blank as far as a command to put to the behavior. I use "touch" for something else that I taught them a long time ago, so when I started teaching targeting with the front feet, I used "tap." I also use "back" to mean back up. So I think I will steal "target" from you, Cindy, for meaning I want them to put their back feet on a target. Thanks!

Here's another little hint I got from one of my instructors that I believe complements Bob's suggestion to teach the dog to back up first. In addition to that, you can also teach the dog to move with you from side to side. So the dog is standing, facing you, and you start to move sideways, and encourage the dog to move sideways with you while keeping his body pointing straight at you. I use the word "follow" for that, although I know some people who have put two different words to it, one for each direction. But once you get him doing that reliably, you can place a target in a place where he will step on it with his back legs if he is following you correctly, and you can mark when that happens.

I use "paws up" for front feet target and "get back" for backup. I plan on using "paw back" for my back feet target when i get to that point.

It makes naming thing a considerable hassle but I found with my ACD mix as a teenager that having a relatively consistent naming scheme allowed her to extrapolate the meaning sometimes. We'll see if it helps Woozle at all. Daisy really couldn't care less, but she cues off of my body language an awful lot.

 Quote: Cheri Grissom

This is an exercise I have been playing around with a bit, too, and I have been drawing a blank as far as a command to put to the behavior. I use "touch" for something else that I taught them a long time ago, so when I started teaching targeting with the front feet, I used "tap." I also use "back" to mean back up. So I think I will steal "target" from you, Cindy, for meaning I want them to put their back feet on a target. Thanks!.

Well, in that case, I will steal "tap" from you!

And we have SuCcEsS! It isn't solid yet, but he is certainly thinking about his back feet now . I thought about the stairs tip and went back to the water bowl (because it's raised, lid wasn't). That coupled with the backup really helped. Maybe when he's big enough to actually reach up our very steep stairs comfortably I will try that too.
Bob and Mara win the super cool points of the day. Thanks all!