Sarah's Education Blog

Yesterday was Winnie’s last day of group training! 

The focus of the lesson was on recall. Winnie is generally pretty good when we ask her to “come,” but she’s not as consistent as we would like her to be. So it was good to have this chance to practice more with her and implement new skills. 

Marker Word: The first thing that was talked about, was using a marker word. This is a word that is used immediately after your dog starts to “come” to you. Our word is “yes,” so as soon as we say “come” and Winnie makes a move towards us, we say that marker word. 

Encouragement and Motivation: Make recall fun and worth it for your dog! It’s important to encourage them the whole way, as soon as they begin to come towards you. 

Movement and Move Away From Them: This is where you take a few steps away from your dog as they are coming towards you and have them move towards their reward instead of you reaching towards them. This is because dogs are naturally attracted to movement and love when you play ‘hard to get’!

Practice and Practice More: The instructors emphasized the importance of practicing for fun 90% of the time and using the command only when you need it 10% of the time. If you practice for fun then they will want to play the game of recall. If you only use it when you need it, for example only when leaving the park or yard, then they might be less willing to come to you.

Winnie had her third week of puppy training last night. This week’s focus was on “leave it,” “take it,” and “drop it.” 

Leave it:  Is for getting them to back off of something they haven’t yet put in their mouth.

 Take it: Tells the pup when they are allowed to take the object,

 Drop it: Is for getting them to drop an item they already have in their mouth.

We started to learn how to teach “leave it” by putting a treat in our hands, showing Winnie, and then closing our hand into a fist and saying “leave it.” Once Winnie stopped sniffing at the hand and just sat there. We opened the hand and said “take it.” Next, we did the same thing but left the treat in an OPEN hand. And once Winnie sat nicely, we said “take it.” The last progression of this skill involved us throwing the treat on the ground nearby and saying “leave it.” Then once Winnie stops pulling on her leash, sits down and waits, then we say “take it.” 

Our homework for the week is to practice “drop it.” The first step of doing this is by getting Winnie’s attention, saying “drop it,” and then throwing high-value treats onto the ground in front of her. This helps her begin to associate the words “drop it” with something good. The next progression is to put a toy in Winnie’s mouth, say “drop it” and then throw down a few high-value treats. The dog should drop the toy and pick up the treats. The key for this is to always give the toy back after you take it, otherwise the dog might associate “drop it” with never getting it back, and therefore, they won’t do it. The next step is to play tug with Winnie and then say “drop it” and give her some treats. Always remember to give the toy back to the dog after this! 

We are loving this group training with Winnie as we have learned so much. Next week is our last class and we are going to be working on recall. 

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. 

In this week’s post about Winnie’s training, I’m going to talk about playing fetch and bringing the ball back. This may seem like a simple task to some of you, but not all dogs like/want to play fetch and it was my mom’s wish to have a dog that she could play fetch with!

At the beginning, Winnie wasn’t that interested in even chasing a ball, so we started to throw the ball up in the air so that it would bounce. She was very attracted to this and loved trying to jump in the air to catch the ball. 

Side note: I don’t have any training resources for this week since I wasn’t planning on teaching this to her. It just came naturally one afternoon and we did what worked for Winnie! 

Once she started to run and chase after the ball, we would say “bring it back” and motion our arms towards us. At first she had no interest and would just lay down and chew on her ball. But the more we did it and encouraged her, she eventually brought the ball back and we would give her a treat. Now in order for her to eat the treat, she had to drop the ball and “leave it,” so that’s initially how she started to actually leave the ball for us so that we could throw it again. 

She’s getting better each day at playing fetch with us, but her interest in it only lasts so long. Normally she will do about 5 and then give up. But it’s coming along! 

The video I have included is from yesterday with my dad practicing with her in the backyard!