Before You Teach Heel, Front, or Center, Teach This

It took me a long time to figure out how to structure this course, because if we're trying to do something like teach our dog a sit, for example, and I want to get the dog generalized, as I said earlier, I want the dog to be able to sit in multiple different locations relative to myself and relative to the environment. Well, in order to do that, I have to be able to get my dog into these different positions. So what we're going to do is we're going to break down all this positional work. So you know how to transfer your dog into each position. We're going to start with the sit because that's the easiest to do in each one. And once we have that foundation down, then we are going to start adding the other positions like down, stand and spin in these positions relative to us. I know I said positions a lot. So we're going to be working on the sit front, the dog directly in front of us. We're going to have the dog in the center. She's being goofy right now. We're going to have our dog on the right side, left side, and we're going to be able to get our dog to go from one position to the next in multiple different ways. And I'm going to show you how to do exactly that. So this is a lot of fun. Luring is really excellent. I do luring with my dogs. Like she knows all the verbal commands, but I still like to do luring exercises with her because it's a lot of fun. It increases that enthusiasm and it's a great way to strengthen the relationship that you have with your dog. So we're going to start that now. This is going to be the easiest one. And you basically have already done this by doing some of those food handling exercises. All we want is our dog to move forward. So your dog should be able to do this. We take the food and we lure our dog forward. And then we give them the food as they're following the lure. So this is those lateral exercises that we did earlier. Now, this moment we're going to transfer to the climb bed. So remember what I said earlier, if we want our dogs to perform a behavior, we have to be able to present a physical cue. So we're going to guide our dogs off of the climb bed, and then we're going to guide them back on. So now I'm showing her how to get off the bed, which this is great because you could transfer this over to different things. Like get out of the vehicle. I tell my dogs off, they'll jump out of the vehicle. Or if your dog jumps up on the sofa and maybe you don't want the dog on the sofa at this time, you can say off and your dog can jump off. So I like to teach them off and I like to teach them climb in the same session. It's very easy. And all I'm doing is I'm using these lateral exercises, these food handling exercises that we practice earlier and I'm giving her the treat. I know you can't really see it in the video, but she's getting the treat right there. Once all her paws come off the climb or once they all go on the climb, I give her a reward. Now there's something that you want to keep in mind. It's known as assisted shaping. So assisted shaping. I use this all the time with dogs that I train. Not every dog is going to jump right off of the climb bed right away. Not every dog is going to go on the bed. When you lure them, some dogs might be a little bit more hesitant. So those dogs might try to go around the bed. You just keep working it until eventually one paw steps on the bed. Boom. Then you reward that. Then your dog might place two paws on the bed. You reward that. So we're rewarding the dog for taking steps towards the final picture. This is important because if you only reward your dog, when they complete the behavior of the exercise, you're trying to get them to do. If you have a dog with low perseverance, then they might quit in the middle of the exercise. You're trying to get your dog to go on the bed. Your dog's not able to do it. Your dog's not following the lure. Your dog's not getting the treat and your dog goes, ah, I can't do it and walks away. We don't want our dogs to give up. So success within dog training for the dog builds success. So if our dogs are constantly winning, they're going to be more willing to try more. So think about it. The concept of increasing difficulty. You want to make the training as easy as possible initially for your dog. So you want to make sure they win. If you've ever played video games, you'll know a lot of video games. They start off very easy and they gradually get more difficult as you become a better player. This is the same thing for our dogs. They're new players in the very beginning. So we want to give them those instant gratification, that instant win quite easily in the beginning. We don't want to make it too difficult, but as our dogs get better, then we start making it more and more challenging to keep the training interesting. If it gets to a point where it's too easy, just like in a video game, then you become bored and you don't want to play it anymore. So we have to make sure that the challenges increase according to the ability of our dog. So again, super simple exercise. We guide them off, give them the treat, guide them back on, try not to drop it, give them the treat. If you like the way this looks and you want to add the command, as I said before, we say the command off. Then we present the cue and give the dog the reward. Climb. Then we would present the cue and give the dog the reward. Now climb. This is a stay. So remember what I said earlier, if we give the dog the verbal command, the stay is implied. So now the only way she can get off of here is if I release her with her termination or terminal marker, I give her a new command or I use the release word like break and then break. She can get off and do whatever she wants, but break doesn't guarantee a reward as free guarantees a reward. So she went back on. She's like, I want, I want a reward. So that's how we're going to release them. But if I tell the dog off, it's, there's not really an off stay. Unless you're trying to have your dog off the sofa. Then of course the dog jumps back up. You would reinforce that. But if I tell her off, she could jump off. I don't have to use a termination marker after I tell her off. This would be the same thing as like a spin. You're not going to do a spin stay. You're not, your dog's not going to keep spinning until you tell them to stop. So commands that don't have a duration position like off or spin, you don't have to worry about releasing them or giving them a new command. So I hope that makes sense. All right, this is the climb and the off the physical cue for the movement. And we're going to start adding more complexity as we move forward. As I already mentioned, luring is a fun exercise that I enjoy doing with all the dogs that I train. And this simple one is going to lead into more complex behavior, such as having our dogs run through our legs, turn around and flip into the center position to spin around into heel, to spin to the other heel, to go to the sit front. There's lots of really cool things sending our dogs around a tree or a cone for fun exercise games. This really can go in all kinds of different directions and add a ton of value to your training. Our next lesson, we're going to be going over what I call the action event. Now, I used to call this the reinforcement event, but that kind of confused people a little bit since reinforcement makes people think of reinforcing a behavior after the fact. So instead I started to call it the action event. It's when we want our dog to perform an action. And there's three key events that I talk about the reward event, the action event, and the correction event. And once you understand all three, it makes training so much easier to understand. I have a full article on this as well that I'm going to put in the description of this video. So be sure to check that out. Make sure you check out our next lesson on the action event. And thank you again for watching. As always, if you can hit the like, it helps more people see the video. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do that as well. Really doesn't make a difference. And I appreciate all your support.