Come! Week 5

Ok, let’s really dig into some challenges to see how far we have brought our come command this month. If you are still working through the exercises don’t push for the challenges yet, spend a little more time building that strong foundation and then come back to these later.

CHALLENGE ONE:

No reward recall challenge. In the house where you have no competing distractions call your dog and reward them only with your physical praise and affection and see how long they choose to stay with you. The longer they stay, the more you know you can use praise and affection as a reward in training, the quicker they leave the more they are dependent on needing those other motivations, which is fine, it just tells us we have more engagement work to do before we can think about fading any rewards.

Let’s talk about how to introduce our dogs to the idea of a delayed reward:

I’ve talked during our live classes to a few of you about really giving specific body language cues to help dogs see our body inviting them to come in, we talked a lot about natural body cues, but we can also train visual cues in to make it easier for our dogs to read us.

PROOFING CHALLENGE:

Set up a chute of your dog’s favorite toys and call them down the middle. Here you can see i’ve placed mine on cups to raise them up higher more into view as they run by. You can also play this game with food on the cups! Practice, we will play this game in class this next weekend!