Taking the box game to place work - pedestal pivots to heel

Here is a live training session with Leo where you can watch me transitioning his send to box game to a send and stay on “place” game. The foundation of that getting in the box and that being where all the cookies happen draws him to that spot. I put a mat inside his box for part of the session and then quickly during the training pull the box away leaving the mat there and he continues to go to that spot. You can see at first I mark and reward his first approaches to it and quickly rebuild up to the same criteria he had when the box was there. You can see me work a few spots where he comes off the mat (I just pause and wait for him to go on the mat to resume the game.

You can also see me working on his pedestal and pivoting to heel. I will now start working on pivoting to the other side as well. Admittedly he was super fast at picking this up! That is also because of my hand positioning before and during rewarding making it lead him quickly to offering that pivot. This will be the start of our heel work. I will be taking his heel work to competition level heel work so with him you will get to see a lot more precision as we move forward.

I’m not including Nosework homework this week to give people a chance to catch up as I know a few people have ordered supplies and are just getting started. Keep working your hides so we can begin moving into the alert side of the training. For people who do not want to train for the target odors but still want to just play and have fun you can keep playing along using food/toys as your search items 🙂.