Sit Happens Dog Training

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Sit Happens Dog Training Edinburgh based dog trainer

28/09/2025

SHAPING - My favourite way to train

This is a long post and definately not a how to guide but more a video to show a different way to train than luring or capturing. There are lots of rules as it is so easy to do wrong and can create so much frustration, but if done well, it builds resilience to frustration and teaches the dog to keep trying.

Shaping marks and rewards incremental steps towards a target behaviour. For example, if I want her to go around the cone, I would think of the steps she would need to take like mark and reward her looking at the cone several times until she is confident that will earn her a reward. Then I stop rewarding it in the hope that she will escalate her behavior and move towards the cone. If she does, I will mark a reward that until she's confident that will earn her a reward. Then I stop rewarding it in the hope that she will escalate her behavior, and so on.

The next step may be moving past the cone and eventually around the cone. When it looks the way I want, I can add a cue.

If she does other things, eg move away from cone, lie down, chew, that's fine, I just wont reward, but if she keeps trying she gets rewarded.

At this age, I'm not bothered with adding the cues. I'm not shaping to teach her new things, I using this principle to teach her to think, to think about what she's doing with her body and keep trying even when she doesn't get it right, because there will be times when training or competing that she won't get it right (that's what happens in sport) and I don't want her to give up, I want her to keep trying.

After this I shaped:

✋🏻 a nose-palm touch
🐾 front paw on a weight plate
👄 picking up a toy with her mouth (I will post this video too)
🐾 Now I'm teaching her to tarhet a foam block with her back paws

What should I teach next?

16/09/2025

Impulse control:

This is a pretty long (and fairly boring 🥱 😂) video showing one of the MANY impulse control exercises that I’m doing with Adeleke. Puppies need to learn impulse control in lots of different ways because there are lots of different impulsive things they want to do… run to you, jump on you, bite, chew, eat, chase etc. but I want her to think about if doing that thing will be rewarded or not.

Impulse control games are intentionally cueless, I don’t want to TELL her what to do, I want her to make good choices.

Here I am paying her in her for being in her bed. I will teach her a more formal ‘Bed’ where I will add cues and rules and my training is more structured, but for this impulse control exercise I don’t want to tell her to go to her bed, I want her to choose to be there.

To start I make the decision easy. I close doors so she can’t leave the kitchen, there’s nothing on the floor to chew, no toys. She has a bed and a water bowl and she can’t get reach the counters.

- In a previous session rewarded her in quick succession and then spaced out the treats, a second at a time.

- then I stepped away and returned to the bed and rewarded, and gradually took more steps.

Here’s where it’s different to teaching a formal bed cue: I don’t add the cue, I just started doing things around the kitchen. She can get up if she likes but if she lies in that bed she gets rewarded. Sometimes she gets up and mouches about but when nothing good happens, she returns to her bed.

This way I can have my coffee, make my juice, make dinner and she’s getting mental stimulation and also learning it’s good to be in her bed 🧡

12/09/2025

Learning to learn - teaching concepts:

At 14 weeks she doesn’t have the focus or stamina to learn things to a high level. I still need to manage all situations but I can start introducing training concepts.

I’m training not to teach her specific things, but get her used to learning and enjoying it.

I’m introducing luring… teaching her follow food and move her body. I can also add some cues. It’ll be a while before the food will be taken out of the picture, but for now I just want to see her follow ing food and performing reps and enjoying it.

I am also doing a lot of impulse control exercises and shaping. Separate posts on these to follow
🧡

05/09/2025

Interactive Play!

Interactive play is where the dog engages with the handler vs independent play where they play by themselves. Both have their uses (I want both) but the former is more useful for training.

I really want to establish a great interactive play with Adi. I made some mistakes with Drico - he is quite sensitive and I was too intense, and I’ve learned the importance of certain elements in play.

Why do I want to play?
Play is a great way of training a dog through arousal while keeping a higher level of excitement and still keep the dog working with us.
For pet dog owners that can be useful to help them teach their dogs how to behave when they are very excited.
For me (a sports dog handler) it teaches my dog how to work and preform with high energy.

• I use a chaser tuggy with an end that is easy for her to grab and hold.

• I hold the handle in my fingertips to handicap myself because I want to a apply competition but I want her to be able to win

• I move with smooth predictable movements and keep her spine parallel to the ground (I don’t jerk her head up)

• I introduce some contact with my hands and if she likes it I can give her a pat or a gentle push… this adds intensity to the play.

• Sometimes she wins, sometimes I win and I activate again, sometimes I win and I throw it. Mixing it up makes it more fun.

IMPORTANT THINGS I LOOK FOR:

1. She’s bringing the toy back to me!
Sometimes she wins it and lies on the floor ripping it, that’s fine, she likes that, but the vast majority of the time she’s bringing it back. This tells me that she finds playing with me more reinforcing.

2. She’s is staying at same energy level or increasing. This means that she is finding the play exhilarating and that I’m doing it right.

I keep the sessions short because it’s tiring for her and I want to keep the quality high.

I will do some training with food or give her a chew afterwards to help her calm.

Developing a routine:❗️It is important to develop a routine to set her expectations and reduce frustration, and help me ...
01/09/2025

Developing a routine:

❗️It is important to develop a routine to set her expectations and reduce frustration, and help me plan my days.
‼️Her brain 🧠 is still developing and I want the neural pathways that suit me to be formed, ie I want her to practice the behaviour I want.

😴 Puppies need lots of sleep (over 20 hrs per day). They can easily become over tired and cranky and they actually become harder to settle, so I keep her wake time short and productive - 30 min to 1 hr depending on the time of day and encourage her to sleep for 2 ish hour bursts

🕕 If she wakes before 7 am I take her to loo 🚽 but I don’t play with her. I encourage her back to sleep, I may sit with her on the sofa. Her tiny bladder may wake her at this stage but I want her circadian rhythm to not wake her before 7 as she gets older

🕖 I take her to loo 🚽
- I use her breakfast to for some training
- We have a play
- she may chew on her antler for a bit while I do stuff around the house

🕗 I take her to loo 🚽
I put her in her crate and I want her to sleep for 2ish hours. If she cries I will take her out for 🚽 but put her back immediately. She may cry for a bit afterwards for attention but will settle herself quickly now.

🕚 I take her to loo 🚽
- I use her next meal to for some training
- We have a play
- She will have a new experience or a short walk
- then she goes back in her crate for sleep

🕑 I take her to loo 🚽
- We have a play or she may get a bigger new experience
- then she goes back in her crate for sleep

🕓 I take her to loo 🚽
- I use her next meal to for some training
- We have a play
- then she goes back in her crate for sleep

🕕 I take her to loo 🚽
- We have a short play - 15 min
- then she goes back in her crate for sleep so I can get on with making our dinner

🕗 I take her to loo 🚽
- I use her next meal to for some training
- We have a play
- then I will snuggle her on the sofa watching TV 📺 and help her relax

🕘 I take her to loo 🚽
- then she goes back in her crate for bedtime 🛏️

Sometimes I’ll do the training after play because it helps calm her, but it depends on the training that I’m doing

💕

30/08/2025

What am I training:

CONSENT

I tried to hold her paws to clip her nails and she tried to bite me. She really didn’t like it! So I have no choice but to teach her to participate in it. I NEVER thought I’d be teaching this to a 12 week old puppy (for context, Drico was 3 when I did this with him) but needs must.

• 1st I stopped her taking the food from the bowl so that I could put the bowl of food in front of her for focus and quick rewards
• then I rewarded her for lying still as i touched her nails
• then I reward holding her paws and touching the clippers off her nails
• I do that lots and I occasionally clip one

Sometimes it’s too much, she gets frustrated and needs a break… that’s fine. She lies back down when she’s ready to continue.

This is an amazing exercise because it teaches her:
• that she’s in control and therefore she will accept more if she know she can stop it
• how to cope with frustration and to work through it

Best of all I get her nails clipped with no fuss 😁

Socialisation and Habituation:From 3-12 ish weeks (14 weeks for some dogs) is said to be the sensitive period. This is t...
28/08/2025

Socialisation and Habituation:

From 3-12 ish weeks (14 weeks for some dogs) is said to be the sensitive period. This is the point that a pup develops its idea of NORMAL.

This is the time when we should expose our pups to the kinds of things they are likely to see and help them interact in the way we would like them to behave as adults. We also want to expose them to small amounts of stress and help them recover so as to build resilience.

What I expect Adi’s normality to be is:
- resting at home
- interacting with me when out at competitions or in urban environments.

At home I try to give her new experiences to build resilience. She walks on different surfaces, I give her new foods to try, play different sounds from YouTube.

She came to a competition with me at the weekend. I carried her around in my arms and occasionally let her down to sniff or play with me. She met some dogs but not most, and met some people.

Today we went into the city. She saw so many different people and really wanted to meet them all, but it’s important that she doesn’t. I want her to casually pass people as an adult.
We stopped and she could look at people but if she lay down or focused on me she was rewarded. She chose to focus on me with people walking around her! 😁👏🎉

She met some people, men, women, children of different ages, that had different hair, skin, hats, glasses, umbrellas.

She saw busses 🚌 and trucks 🛻 and trams 🚃 from the safety of my arms. We went into a bakery 🥯 and stopped at the doors to perfume shops so that she could experience different smells. She was on an escalator in my arms to experience different motion. We did some focus inside the St James centre and on Princes st. so that the sound of indoors vs outside didn’t play a roll.

I was also careful to bring water💦 even though it wasn’t hot. Brains 🧠 need water to function. Puppies get very thirsty when doing new things.

She took it all in her stride and fell asleep as soon as I put her in the car 🥱😴

Teaching my puppy to settle herself:Towards the end of last week I started introducing this. Since I took her home I hav...
27/08/2025

Teaching my puppy to settle herself:

Towards the end of last week I started introducing this. Since I took her home I have been helping her settle by cuddling her or playing the lie down in crate game (see previous videos) until she got sleepy and went to sleep.

However, now I need her to learn to settle herself because there’ll be times when she wakes and I may not be there to help her back to sleep.

I leave her in her large crate or play area and she needs to figure out how to go to sleep. This is always a tough thing as there will inevitably be some frustration. She expects me to come and settle her. She barks and whines, and I need to ignore it. I walk around the house doing housework so she knows I’m there and doesn’t get scared. If she sounds very upset I watch her for a minute and when she sees me, she lies down because she has learned that this is the way to get my attention. This tells me that she’s thinking and not over threshold. But I do need to ignore her because she has to learn to go to sleep herself. She does after a while. Success! But it will need to be repeated and unlike other training, we can’t do lots of short reps. I will do this again, but not every time. Sometimes I will she’ll help her settle.

The sooner she learns to settle herself, the happier she’ll be. It’s a very important exercise, that why I start it young.

20/08/2025

Teaching my puppy not to freak out when I leave her.

Video 1:

All puppies will cry for attention when faced with and barrier or frustration. They cry to their mother signal that they need or want attention so this is all they know at this stage… this is not the same as separation anxiety.

Video 2:

I put her in the crate and wait for her to lie down.
The moment she does, I mark yes and immediately open the crate door.
Then I repeat.
After several repetitions (when I think she understands the game) I make her wait a bit longer.
She has to use her brain and this helps tire her out doing a calm behaviour. And then she falls asleep.
I do this with this crate in different locations: different rooms, the car, the garden.

Video 3:

I use the same principle with different barriers (play pen) to teach her that lying down gets attention and barking or whining does not.

This week my main focuses are: 🛟 Making her feel safe and comfortable - she’s going to have some scary stuff happen to h...
13/08/2025

This week my main focuses are:

🛟 Making her feel safe and comfortable -
she’s going to have some scary stuff happen to her in her life, I want her to trust me

🦮 Introduce Drico carefully so that he is comfortable with his new family member

💩 Toilet training

🧘🏿‍♀️Self soothing and impulse control (videos to follow). She needs to learn how to be comfortable by herself so I can do things around the house.

12/08/2025

Drico was not interested in the puppy. He usually loves puppies but I guess he’s never met one so young.

He’s not that keen on her yet. He’s avoiding her… and that’s fine. I made sure that I have a safe space for her to pup around and he has the freedom of the house. We have a little sofa in there and my desk so she can play, sleep and be comfortable.

He’s been patient but definitely put out. It will take time. It’s important that he feels as comfortable as possible.

When she’s in her crate, I leave the gate open so he can come be with me and not be bothered by her.

Today I put on some soothing music and he snoozed in the same space as her 🙂. Progress 🥳

On Sunday I brought home a new puppy🐾 💕This is Adeleke, she is 10 weeks old today. I will be posting regularly about my ...
12/08/2025

On Sunday I brought home a new puppy🐾 💕

This is Adeleke, she is 10 weeks old today.

I will be posting regularly about my journey with her for anyone interested, introducing her to Drico, what I’m focusing on and training.

So follow for pupdates ☺️

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Dog Training Services

Fun, positive, science based trainer. Available for home or park training sessions. Manageable training plans to modify undesired behaviours using games and easy techniques. Fun sessions to build communication and bond with your furry family member.