Not that I am competitive. Apparently just lost this race at Crufts. Lucky Mexx enjoyed herself and there were no prizes involved. 😀😀
Day out preparing for Crufts 2024. Training in a busy environment with different sights and sounds. At Waterloo with tannoy announcements followed by London Eye. 🎡
Cosmo is a 5.5 month old Australian Labradoodle and he has mainly come to do environmental work, furthering his experiences with the world and building confidence with sights and sounds. Good foundation training will help us be successful so we will spend time on his communication process and enjoyment of engagement. Building trust in our relationship and positive emotional responses to cues and games which will help us when out and about to diffuse stimuli that may be more of a challenge
Happy National Dog Day from all at Click-2-Heel! We hope you are all having a lovely bank holiday weekend with your furry friends!
We would love to see some pictures in the comments. 🐶🐾
#nationaldogday
Welcome Splash Di's latest residential dog with environmental issues that extend to everything that moves or doesn't move!
Di is busy building a relationship and communication process as well as reinforcing behaviours which will help him cope in different environments.
Here Di and Splash are working on toy play skills helping him with impulse and arousal control.
Swapping between two toys and using a toy as a reinforcer for fun behaviours will help give Splash some alternative activities to his passion of hunting.
PREPARING YOUR DOG FOR SUNDAY’S EMERGENCY SIREN
NOTE: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS THE SOUND OF A SIREN, PLEASE SILENCE THE VIDEO UNLESS YOU ARE READY TO START TRAINING.
Some of you may be aware that the Government is testing a new Emergency Alert System this weekend. On Sunday 23rd April at 3pm there will be a test of the new system, meaning all mobile phones (even if they are set to silent) will sound the alarm – a siren and vibration, lasting for up to 10 seconds. Importantly, the loud siren will sound, even if the mobile phone is set on silent.
If you have a dog that is sensitive to sounds, please remember to keep any phones well away from your dogs at this time to avoid any fear reactions. For those of you that have already done lots of previous work in conditioning a positive association with other sounds and with lots of history of using a Treat Party (which means a scattering of food on the floor for your dog to find and enjoy) then it will be a good idea to use the Treat Party to help your dog form positive associations with the siren sound. As the sound will run for at least 10 seconds, a generous Treat Party works well as your dog will be able to continue finding treats for the duration of the sound. You’ll see Di’s dogs practicing in this video. You might even want to get ahead and use the sound on this video (or the Government Demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvZM-oCReu8) to practice with your dogs beforehand. Remember to start with lower volume and build up over a couple of sessions. If in doubt, just keep your dog safely away from your phones at 3pm on Sunday.
BACK FEET TARGETS
Teaching your dog a back feet target might look like a bit of a gimmick, but it’s actually a behaviour that’s full of benefits. For a start, it will help with balance and core strength. What’s more, many dogs are generally driven by their front half and struggle with awareness of their back legs. Teaching a back paw target will help to overcome this, increasing back-half awareness and so helping with general co-ordination. And then there’s proprioception. In simple terms, that’s the constant feedback loop in your dog’s nervous system – a form of body awareness. Building better body awareness through a back feet target will help your dog to navigate day-to-day tasks and obstacles in a safer manner. One last thing…with continued training and increasing criteria, you can even build to a handstand up the wall, as demonstrated here by Di and Mimic. Surely Gymnastics Team GB will be calling up Mimic after that excellent performance…
Join us for a brand-new course and learn about the dog sport of Hoopers. Hoopers is a fun dog sport that is suitable for dogs of all sizes, all breeds, all ages (from 6 months) and of all fitness levels and abilities; which makes it a truly inclusive sport. Dogs navigate a course of hoops, barrels and tunnels with the same fun appeal as agility. But the courses are all at ground level (with no jumping) and are flowing and don't involve tight turns – making it lower impact and more accessible for everyone! The course will be held in Ryslip’s outdoor enclosed exercise field.
All exercises are low impact and the course is suitable for dogs (from 6 months) that have already completed some general training with Click-2-Heel.
- Develop your training skills and extend the range of fun activities you can do with your dog; you might just catch the Hoopers Bug!
- Learn about the equipment used in Hoopers and the skills you will need to navigate simple courses
- Build your dog’s skills around forward focus and understanding directional cues
- Help your dog learn to train and focus around other dogs
- A great way to bond with your dog and great for your dog’s coordination skills and fitness
DATE: Tuesday 18th April 2023 at 6.15pm for 5 consecutive weeks
The cost for the training course is £110 for 5 weeks. Joining instructions and payment methods will be sent prior to the course start date.
To book a space please contact us by email at [email protected].
Where do we begin to explain the joy of learning scentwork with your dog? It’s fun, it’s fascinating, it’s eye-opening, it’s beneficial for your dog, it’s accessible to all dogs and it’s easy to teach in the comfort of your own home. What’s not to love?
You only need to watch your dog out on a walk to know that scent is their primary world. But it’s only when you learn to challenge your dog with scent searches you set yourself, that you’ll really discover just what a superpower your dog possesses.
“There's nothing so amazing as being on the other end of the lead as your canine partner uses his superpower, it just never gets old.”
Fancy giving it a go?
Introduction to Scentwork is our online course, with step-by-step video tutorials to follow at your own pace. The course will show you how to introduce your dog to a target odour, teach them how to find it and ultimately tell you where it is. It’s equally suited to those who want to do little searches around the house as it is for anyone wanting to progress to sports scentwork. Find out more at our dedicated website
scentdogtraining.co.uk
SAFETY POSITION 8 – TOOL FOR DOG SPORTS
The Safety Position hasn’t finished giving yet. There’s one more benefit we need to share as the finale to this series. Dog sports are a popular pastime that have many benefits for dogs and owners alike. From building a stronger bond and providing mental stimulation, to making new friends and keeping fit, sports are good all round. With so much choice, there’s a dog sport to suit every dog and every owner. From hoopers and agility, scentwork and mantrailing, to gundog training and competitive obedience the choice is vast. And the Safety Position is useful for most of them.
In agility and hoopers, it creates an excellent basis of a set-up at the start of the course. By standing at the starting spot and positioning yourself at the correct angle for the first line within the course, you can call your dog into the Safety Position and have them at that perfect angle too. Plus, the Look and Go game trains your dog to look forward, ready to set off perfectly for the first obstacle. In competitive obedience, a core part of the challenge is to train a Send Away. A Send Away requires the dog to run in a straight line to a designated point when they are required to go into a down on a verbal cue. The Safety Position is a great method to ensure your dog is set up correctly and lined up for the exercise required. Di’s Obedience Champion Lupitoonz Eazi Peaze demonstrates this perfectly. This same combination of the Safety Position and the Look and Go game is also a great tool for setting up gun dogs for retrieves. If you fancy giving any of these sports a go, why not sign up to one of our Introductory Courses. Click-2-Heel runs regular courses on Introduction to Hoopers, Agility Foundations, Scentwork Foundations, Competitive Obedience and Introduction to Sports and Games (where you can have a go at lots of sports to find the one you love). Just email the office at [email protected] for more information and to book your p
SAFETY POSITION 7 – VETERINARY HOLDS
The vet can be a stressful place and it’s hard to explain to our dogs what is happening and that everything is being done for their own good. As well as the general confidence training and building positive associations that we always recommend, there’s more specific training you can do to help. There are lots of reasons your vet might need to take a blood sample from your dog, from helping with the diagnosis of conditions to monitoring levels of long-term drugs. The Safety Position forms the basis of two veterinary holds often used to take blood. Within the Safety Position, your dog’s head is lifted into the air to take a sample from the neck. Alternatively, in this same position, a front leg is extended forward for a sample to be taken from the leg. By practicing these positions at home prior to them being needed in the vet, your dog will have more confidence in what is happening when they experience it for real. Some vets will even allow you to hold your own dog if you are a confident handler, which is a great help for dogs that are shy of new people. Lowering stress levels at the vet is so important and will also help to improve health outcomes.
SAFETY POSITION 6 – USES FOR PUPPIES
Now it’s time to explain why we call this the Safety Position. We all know the importance of crate training. One of its main benefits is giving puppies a safe space from where they can watch the household goings-on, without any worry about being approached by the scary hoover or the annoying cat. When conditioned correctly, a crouching version of the Safety Position creates a portable safe space for use when out and about.
If puppies are worried about things in the big wide world, using the Safety Position paired with a pre-conditioned Collar and Feed, provides a distraction tool and a way to slowly build confidence out and about. Many puppies like to go under things to play, mimicking the safety of a den, and this helps to replicate that when out for early socialisation and familiarisation sessions. They have the choice to come out for some social interaction and then return in there when they need a break. Owners can be fully in control from this position, blocking access to their puppy if needed, until the puppy is ready. It’s a technique that can be used as dogs grow up too – a useful way of taking their focus away from environmental distractions and giving you more control.
SAFETY POSITION 5 – TRICKS
The Safety Position is the position than never stops giving. Think you’ve mastered all the fun games? The fun doesn’t need to stop there. There are plenty of other fun tricks to teach using ‘Middle’ as the foundation. You could teach your dog to move into a raised sit or beg, or the super-cute trick of getting them to place their front paws on your feet so that you can walk along together like a four-legged race! Tricks give you plenty of Insta-worthy moments, but they also provide mental stimulation as you challenge your dog to learn something new. There’s more. Training tricks always helps you to improve your own training skills – whether it’s your mechanical skills, your timing skills, your treat delivery skills or your shaping and luring skills, it’s the perfect chance to hone your training techniques.
SAFETY POSITION 4 – FUN GAMES
Even if it takes a few months, you will get to the point where your dog is happily playing the Base Game and is confident in you moving and touching them as part of the process. Now it’s time for the fun games to begin! Challenge you and your dog to see what you can jointly achieve.
Middle-Look-Go is a brilliant extension of the game. Once your dog is standing in the position, gently hold their collar, say ’Look’ and throw a piece of food ahead. Say ‘Go’ to release the dog to get the food. Eventually your dog will understand the pattern and you’ll no longer need to hold their collar to stop them running for the food before the release. This helps your dog build impulse control around food, another important life skill. And it builds the ’Look’ cue to mean look ahead which will help in other dog sports too. You can swap things up by introducing a toy as the reward, and adding distance.
There are endless games on offer. Can your dog move into the Safety Position on the verbal cue ‘Middle’ alone? Can they move into position if they are standing to your side, or in front of you, or from a greater distance or from anywhere else relative to you? Can they stay in position as you walk slowly along, moving with you? How about running along with you in position? This stage is all about raising your criteria, developing your joint learning skills, increasing your bond and building trust and confidence. Game on!
SAFETY POSITION 3 – CONFIDENCE BUILDING
The Safety Position will eventually make a great place to carry out handling tasks with your dog. Remember, this isn’t a natural position for dogs to enjoy and it can take a while to build trust, so take your time in getting good history with the Base Game before you progress. When you’re happy that your dog has positive emotions with the position, you can try moving on to help grow more confidence in the position.
With your dog in position, try swaying from left to right, lifting up one leg or gently walking on the spot and reinforcing these movements with your rewards. Always start with a few repetitions of the Base Game and then try one version with movement and revert back to the Base Game. Watch your dog’s body language and if they are looking at all uncomfortable, such as flinching or backing off, then make the exercise simpler again and break it down into smaller steps forward.
Once your dog is happy with you moving with them in position, try introducing some gentle handling. Are they happy for you to stroke them or hold their collar? Again, remember to introduce this slowly at the pace your dog is comfortable and always mixing it with the fun Base Game to protect their love of the game. Keep sessions short and fun and mix it up with other games they love, like Food Circuits. This is all part of building your dog’s confidence in the position and trusting that they are safe there.
SAFETY POSITION 2 – FINDING POSITION
The Base Game teaches your dog that there’s lots of fun on offer in the Safety Position game. Once that positive emotion is established, it’s time to teach our dogs to find the position for themselves. We can begin by standing at slightly different angles when calling them into position – so they have to think about the position of your legs and work out how to move into place, even if you’re not standing directly square to them. Eventually we want to build to the stage where our dogs can start in front of us and then move into the Safety Position – that saves us turning our backs to them every time we want to play. Some dogs might pass through your legs forward, turn around behind you and come back into the middle. Others might walk around your legs and then walk into place in the middle. It’s a great mental challenge for dogs to figure out how to get into position, one that they’ll find really rewarding once they’ve cracked it.
SAFETY POSITION 1 – BASE GAME
We’re excited to start our new series of videos this week, all about the Safety Position. It’s a vital part of our training toolkit and one we encourage everyone to develop. Let’s begin with how we start to train it. We call this stage the Base Game and it’s the way we build fun, reward and value into the position for our dogs. It’s a nice and simple game but it has many layers of agendas. It builds a positive emotion about the RUN cue, which can also be used for emergency recall alongside our other run games. It also builds on the use of the BOWL HAND, the tool we use for multi-feeding our dogs. This positive picture is the device we use to help our dogs gain trust in being between our legs. It can be a strange place to be at first, as dogs can feel a bit trapped with us towering over them, but by building reinforcement history in this position, your dog will soon learn that great things happen in the safety position. Let’s get going: Run- Middle-Run!
COMING NEXT WEEK…
Where do we begin to explain the versatility and power of the safety position? It might just look like a cute trick of teaching your dog to stand between your legs, but it’s so much more. Join us next week for a special series of posts where we explain how to teach it, why it’s called the safety position, its use in building trust and handling techniques and how to use it to teach a myriad of other behaviours and tricks. Prepare to be amazed!
DID YOU SEE SCENT DOG TRAINING AT CRUFTS?
Di loved catching up with lots of friends at Crufts this lunchtime. Thank you to everyone who came along to watch the demonstration. It marked the launch of Di’s new online course: Introduction to Scentwork. Here’s just a little of the scent team in action…
What’s it about?
Crufts winner Di Martin and Scent Detection Handler Lyn Bowers have paired up to develop the ultimate online course for Scent Dog Training. If you’ve ever fancied giving scent training a go with your dog, this is the perfect course for you. This fascinating hobby is accessible and inexpensive, all you need to get started are two glass jars, several socks, a jar of clove buds, and some boxes! The course will show you how to introduce your dog to a target odour, teach them how to find it, and ultimately tell you where it is! The course is as equally suited to those who want to do little searches around the house as it is anyone wanting to do sports scentwork. Any dog can do it, large or small, young or old, blind dogs, dogs with reduced exercise tolerance, disabled dogs… literally any dog.
How do you find out more?
Start your own scent journey today – you won’t regret it. Your dog will love it and you will love it, so why not give it a go? Get the course now via our dedicated website https://scentdogtraining.co.uk
A reminder to come and see us at Crufts today at 12:30 at the Good Citizens Ring in Hall 3! Di is there and settled with her dogs and is loving the environment! Looking forward to seeing you all there! 🐾
