One of the most useful behaviours you can teach your dog in the house is to goto and stay in his bed or crate until you give him a verbal release. This has no end of uses and you will never be sorry you trained this!
You can have a dog bed in the corner of the kitchen so if you’re cooking the dog(s) have their ‘place’ to be rather than under your feet. You can use the same behaviour to have your meals in peace – have your dog goto and stay on the bed rather than beg at the table. You can ask them to goto bed when someone rings the doorbell – having a mat near the door so they can see who it is good. If you have more than one dog you can be training one dog while the others stay on their bed and wait their turn.
In exercise 6.2 then we’re going to start developing the foundation behaviour of following your hand signal to goto a specific place and stay there. When you start this training it really helps to have something that’s raised as it forms an obvious platform / boundary that’s comfortable for the dog so a dog bed is ideal. Crucially we want the dog to learn to goto bed and SETTLE DOWN – don’t forget the second part!
This is the first part of a two part tutorial covering everything you need to know about training your dog to goto bed and to stay there until you give them permission to break the stay (called a ‘release cue’ which we covered in Exercise 6.1). You will also need to have completed exercise 5.2 which covers teaching your dog to lie down to a hand signal.
1. Introducing your dog to the ‘GOTO BED’
2. Adding a Down
3. Extending the duration and rewarding the settle
In the second part of this tutorial next week we’ll look at Adding the Three Ds to this behaviour – Distance, Duration & Distraction. We want our dogs to be able to stay on the bed for as long as we ask them to no matter how far away the handler walks, and no matter the number of distractions that appear.
Have fun!