By Sarah Groves Dog Training - your puppy training specialist covering Neath, Port Talbot and Swansea areas
‘Sit’....
is one of the FIRST things that we teach our puppy – whether it’s intentional or not – usually a puppy quickly learns that ‘sit’ gets them attention or treats.
HOWEVER, once your puppy sits, it’s normally quickly marked off as ‘oh my dog knows that now’ - when actually there’s soooo many ways in which that simple bum on floor can be improved on, and then used to your advantage.
One of the first things that I teach in one to one lessons is HOW to improve on basic behaviours using what we call the THREE D’S:
1) Duration
how long can your pup sit for?
2) Distractions
Can your pup sit when there’s distractions going on?
3) Distance
Can your pup sit when at a distance from you, or can you create distance while your pup remains in the sitting position?
Then there’s taking this simple behaviour and repeating in brand new environments!
Dog’s aren’t very good at generalising – meaning that even though your pup may do an awesome sit on verbal cue in the living room in the house, this doesn’t mean that they will also know that this means the same thing out in the park.
So with all behaviours that you teach, it’s likely that you will need to repeat from scratch in a few different places before it’s realised that bum on floor for 2 minutes until you give next instruction means the same thing EVERYWHERE!
There’s sooooo many ways which you can use this simple sit to your advantage:
- Sit to greet people
- Sit and relax while you’re in a coffee shop having a coffee
- Sit while you open the front door
- Sit when you are at a curb ready to cross the road
- Sit while you have a 2 minute chat to a fiend you bumped into while on a walk
All of these would need your dog to have practised to sit with duration, distractions and distractions for many repetitions first, but putting in the time and effort for ALL behaviours, not just a sit, is well worth it in the end!
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