Last night Winnie had her first “professional” training class with Baby Dog. We met at a Bosley’s with four other dogs in the class. The session began with learning new praise and release words. These words are “yes” and “break”. 

We learned that “yes” is said when your dog does a desired command, followed by giving them a treat, and “break” is used to release your dog from a command such as “stay.” 

“Sit” – Winnie is very good at sitting but it was very good to go over it again with the new words we learned and in such a distracting environment. We would command her to “sit,” say “yes” when she did it, and then give her a treat. We did this multiple times to reinforce the behavior. She was able to do this very well and was even used as the demonstration dog for this skill. 

“Stay” – The teacher taught a different way of this skill than the previous way we were training her to do this. We were told to tell her to “stay,” then immediately say “yes” and give her a reward, and then “break” to release her. We were told not to back up and make her stay but to instead keep saying “yes” while standing there but with the goal being to have more time doing that before saying “break.” This task was a little bit more challenging for Winnie with all the distractions and other dogs in the store. But she still did a very good job. 

“Look” – The last skill we learned was how to make Winnie look at us. We did this by putting the treat right in front of her mouth, then bringing it up to our forehead so she looked at us. Once she did that, we said “yes” and then gave her the treat. This was a completely new skill that Winnie had never done before so she struggled a little bit at first, but we were actually very impressed with how quickly she was able to get it.Â