I know you drooly dog owners can relate. 🥴 #drool #dogtraining #boerboel #droolworthy #finalfour #marchmaddness #lovely
Never let them know your next move. #funny #playgroundgames #neverletthemknowyournextmove #dogtrainingisfun #dogtraining #confidence
Oh look a trigger 🥴 #dogtraining #reallife #ohwell #fun #dogs #livelaughlove ghlove
Don’t you love it when this happens?! 😇 #dogtraining #joerogan #friends #letsgetalong #lifestylek9 #trending
Confidence building with Argos! #lifestylek9 #dogtraining #confidencebuilding #rockwall #dogvideo #argos
Pound it is a fun little trick to learn, but the real reason I taught him this is to help create short and sweet interactions to build confidence with strangers.
Argos is an amazing dog, but he has low confidence in certain situations. For a dog of his size, this can easily become a behavioral problem if he finds out that reactivity is what gets strangers to go away. Because of his breed, he also has little room for error, so it’s better to nip this in the butt early!! (He is just over a year old)
Let’s break it down:
Every time Argos boops my hand, he gets rewarded, and that makes him feel good! (When he eats food, the hormone dopamine is released, which makes him feel good!)
Now, after multiple repetitions, he will boop my hand and expect food! He has learned that if I do this (boop), the food comes out!
How can you tell when he starts to expect food? After performing the command, he begins to look at me! Since I am the one giving him the food, he is expecting it to come from me! This is the baseline we are looking for!
How does this turn into a confidence-building exercise? Great question!
Because Argos has been conditioned to expect food after completing the command, the expectation of receiving food will release dopamine! (Interesting, right!?) If you remember from above, every time dopamine is released, it makes them feel good! We now have the power to associate stranger interactions with good feelings!
I would absolutely start with friends and family, but for the sake of not writing a book, I’m going to skip that! But same rules apply it’s just more practice!
When a stranger comes up and asks, “CaN I pEt YoUr DoG?” I’ll say “no, we are working on building his confidence around strangers, but if you’d like to help us, hold your fist out and say pound it!”
Argos will perform the command. After doing it, he will default to that expectation of food (because it has been practiced!!), dopamine will be released, and he gets rewarded by
