GET ENGAGED MODULE 3

WORKING IN NEW PLACES

It’s important you set your dog up for success and start your work in places where you dog can succeed, like your yard or living room. Working in new places doesn’t just happen after you get engagement in one place. When you are training a dog and want to build your engagement it's important that you systematically introduce your dog to the concept of working in new places. Because of the way dogs struggle more than humans to generalize a behavior to a new environment you have to have a plan of how to help them be successful. Watch this video to get some pointers and ideas about taking your engagement game on the road to new places!

USING A TUG AND TREAT TOY

Many of you have seen me using that food holding toy on my IG stories. Here is a video showing how I introduce the toy and build my steps to working on fetch with it. It’s such a GREAT toy for helping dogs that have either low toy interest or dogs that don’t want to share their toy with you. They need your help to get the food so it creates partnership add the emotion and you create connection.

MORE ON TOY POSSESSION

Here you can watch me work through severe ball obsession and possession with a ball. if you take a high drive dog and consistently take things away from them when they don't want you to, you can end up with a dog that won't play with you with the toy. Prior to this lesson this dog's owners and a group of people spent a couple hours trying to get her to come home once she got a hold of a ball. They could not catch her no matter what they tried as she was so wise to all the ways someone would trick her out of her ball. She even tried leaving and the dog was like "k- bye".

It only took me a couple sessions showing her I share nicely for her to love to play WITH me. You both create possession, so first you have to address your behavior around toys if your dog is possessive. Slow yourself down and work on connecting with the dog and know once you get that the retrieve part is easy.

SNEAKING TRAINING INTO YOUR ENGAGEMENT GAMES

So all of our engagement building gets to start help us build a connection so we can teach them obedience exercises in a way that still keeps them engaged and happy to listen to us! Keep your sessions SHORT and FUN! More play than training. Stay under 5 minutes! Don't risk losing their focus.

BRINGING IN FOCUS FOR EASILY OVER AROUSED PLAYERS

This exercise is for our players, that maybe get too excited, bitey, jumpy or over excited by play that need a little help staying in a working engaging frame of mind even when excited. Don't play this yet with toys if your dog is still building a desire to play at all, for those pups you want to keep building drive before you put in any rules.

So homework for my good toy players: build excitement with your engagement cues, while maintaining a sit before the release!