New Places
This week I want to focus on taking your dog’s new skills on the road!
Many people do not realize that dogs do not generalize behaviors well. What does this mean? Well as a human if I teach you to read the word stop in the house at the kitchen table, you can then recognize it when you see it on a street sign and all the other places you see the word written. But with a dog, if I teach my dog the word “sit” in my living room, and then take my dog for a walk and ask him to sit, he very well might have any idea what I am talking about, because to him sit means when I am in the living room and you tell me to sit and hold a cookie over my head I sit but it only means that in that one place. So with dogs we need to take them out to new places and work on teaching them all of these behaviors mean the same thing.
The order you want to add new places should be strategic. Start with an area your dog frequent access to: front driveway/sidewalk, parking area near the house you walk by each day, park down the street or find a very quiet area with minimal distractions: empty church parking lot, shopping center parking lot on a day the shops are closed, gated off logging road, vacant lot, etc.
When you first get there don’t try to engage your dog. Let them explore the area, stand still and hold the end of the leash and let the dog look at and sniff whatever they please. Wait for your dog to get bored and when they look at you wondering why you are just standing there, begin to engage them with either a toy and some play, or a treat toss or two. Once your dog is engaging with you sneak in a few behaviors to your engagement. So ask for a sit, then resume playing once they do, ask for down, then resume playing when they do. Keep your session mostly play and engagement with their best known at home behaviors snuck into the play. See the video from Module 3 of the Get engaged class for starting engagement in a new place.
A little further down the page of module 3 is this next video on how to sneak the behaviors into your engagement games.
So your homework for this week is to find at least one new place and to try to get your dog to play with you, either using toys &/or treats, then see if you can get a sit, down (if they are fluent with it at home), and a super short successful stay.
If you are participating in this weeks group training class we will be once again working on furthering cooperative care, so be sure to practice that game where you hold the dog back and place the food in the bowl in front of them that we did in a previous group class. And also work on the chin rest which you can find more details about in Foundations Module 4.