This unit focuses on making the connection between puppy and human by building attention through eye contact and targeting. Additionally we present information on the basics of how we train in general, and clicker training specifically. Positive training is a tremendous foundation to building a lifelong connection between you and your dog.

RELAXATION / ATTENTION

• Clicking and treating for eye contact
• Teaching go to Mat
• Relaxation on a Mat

INFORMATION

Clicker Basics

• We use a clicker to mark what we like
• We follow each click with a treat
• We ignore what we don’t want

Food Treats

• We use food because it’s a primary reinforcer: it is needed to live, and is inherently rewarding.
• Food is an efficient reward
• We treat generously in terms of rate of reinforcement
  Try giving your dog ten treats in ten seconds and see how strong his response is.
• We’re stingy with respect to the size of each treat
  The size of a tiny pea is plenty for a large dog.

Four Ways to Train a New Behavior

• Lure
  Use food to move your dog into position. Click/treat.
• Capture
  Catch your dog in the act of doing something you like. Click/treat.
• Shape
  Click/treat approximations of the goal behavior.
• Target
  Teach your dog to touch nose, paw, or other body part to a target. Use targeting to create more complex behaviors.

BEHAVIOR

Targeting
Teach your dog to touch a body part such as a nose or paw to the target. Some targets might be:

• Hand
  Your dog touches his nose or paw to your hand.
• Mat
  Your dog goes to lie down on his mat.
• Crate
  Your dog goes into his crate.
• Eye contact
  When your dog makes eye contact with you even this is a form of targeting: orienting his eyes to your eyes.

From the Levels by Sue Ailsby:

Sue Ailsby is an accomplished trainer in Canada who developed a wonderfully layered approach to training dogs. With her blessing we are using many of her materials as part of our curriculum, with her original Canadian spelling intact. Here is a list of steps she has written to teach and develop targeting behavior. Note what she calls “comeafters”. Those are nice developments of the original behavior which raise the bar ever so slightly.

1. Dog touches your hand with her nose.
   Add a cue.
   Comeafters – Change your position and reteach
2. Dog reaches high and low to touch your hand with her nose.
   Add the cue.
   Comeafters – Teach the same behaviour with another person nearby
3. Dog takes 3 steps to touch your hand.
   Add the cue.
   Comeafters – Teach the same behaviour in another room
   
4. Dog touches your hand twice to get 1 click.
   Add the cue.
   Comeafters – Teach all [the previous] Steps with the dog targeting your foot
   
5. Practise moving dog with your hand target

CONFIDENCE / SOCIALIZATION

Exploring Novel Objects

We let our puppies interact with an assortment of weird things at their own pace. Sometimes we’d give them a treat, or a click/treat, for being brave. Some of the objects included:

• Chairs on their sides
• Stools on their sides
• Cones
• Toys

HOMEWORK
Catch your dog doing five things you like. Click and treat!