Welcome to Online Dog Coach. This is Suzy and now that you have your dog coming to you in familiar situations it’s time to start working on getting your dog to come in unfamiliar situations. This is called proofing. Getting your dog to come to you reliably is useful in dangerous situations. For instance, a rabbit darts out into the street and your dog’s instincts kicks in. You want your dog’s ability to come to you on your command to override that instinct.
In this lesson, you will need patience, your dog, a variety of treats and a long line. You’ll also want an assistant who can help you with the distractions. This is also a good time to think about the quality of treats that you’re using as discussed in our article on treats and reward and also revisit jackpot that you’ve learned in the lesson in getting your dog to come to you.
I'm using a variety of dogs for this lesson because every dog has their own thing that they need to work on. First, I'm going to put Rankin on a seat-stay. I'm going to toss a couple of toys out here and I'm going to put some distance between me and the dog. As I call him, Aaron is going to toss a toy out there and see if we can get him to respond to me as I call him. You can use the leash to reel him a little bit and when they respond under really distracting situation remember your jackpot which is several small treats all in a row.
This is Kelly and I'm going to work on her with other dogs as a distraction. I'm just going to move out keeping her on the long line and then I'm going to ask Aaron to run in with another dog and call Kelly to me.
Once your dog comes to you reliably in your own backyard make sure you go to other locations such as the park and make sure you have them all on a long line to keep them safe. So I have Kelly on the long leash and I'm going to just let her wander around. I mean she is distracted about something. Now go ahead call her to me and I'm going to give her lots of reward and I got the extra yummy treats.
You can also practice to come when they’re interested in other things as well such as sniffing along the trail. And she came even though she was interested in something else. That’s exactly what we want and now go ahead and give her my least reward. That deserves an extra reward because there was a little wild animal that took off when we’ve came up. She wanted to chase but she came. Now, she’s going to go check out that animal again.
So there’s that wild animal that was a great distraction and you want to make sure that every opportunity you have with your dog is a training opportunity. If your dog does happen to run away from you and played the “don’t, you can't catch me” type of game. There are a couple of thing that you should and should not do.
One thing is don’t chase the dog. If you chase the dog that’s just encouraging the dog to continue to play that game. What you want to do if they really won’t come to you when you’re calling is to run away from the dog and then they’ll come chasing you. The other thing to keep in mind is that when you do call your dog and they come to you that is a success even though the dog has been making you chase him for several minutes. It’s a success when you call and they come to you. So make sure you reward that no matter how frustrated you might be with them.
Thank you for joining me. You are one step closer to safe and responsible fun with your dog.
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