Most dogs love to learn if it is a positive experience for them. It's good to think ahead and plan if we want to teach a new trick or behaviour.
Considerations might be:
What is your training plan? What is the behaviour we want to teach?
The more specific we make our goal behaviors, the better.
What props will you need?
Training pouch, physical items (steps/toys/jumps/target stick)
What reinforcement will you use?
It could be food, a toy or a ball (or a combination of all of these)
What does your dog like the best? Where will you train?
A quiet location without distractions is better to start with
How many repetitions should you do?
Using Push/Drop/Stick Rules When using a plan, we repeat the current step until our dog gets it right more often than they get it wrong. That means we count how many repetitions we are doing. Try doing sets of five repetitions at a time.
Push: The dog got the current step right 4/5 or 5/5 times, so we can push to the next step in the plan.
Drop: The dog got the current step right only 1/5 or 2/5 times, so we should drop to the previous step in the plan.
Stick: The dog got the current step right 3/5 times, so we should repeat, or stick, on the current step in the plan.
Once your dog can competently do the behaviour in a low distraction environment, you can start to generalise it to other situations by adding one of the 3 "D's" at a time. Work on Distance, Duration or Distraction until you dog is fluent . If your dog is struggling at any time, go back a step. It's good to return to something your dog can do well - even when training a new behaviour. We dont always want to make it harder...
Have a great day, Toby x
Here is a video on "How to teach your dog to chin rest".
This is a great husbandry behaviour to keeping your dog in position and feeling comfortable with essential healthcare >
Have a great day,
Toby x
