Latest / The Puppy Training Podcast / Episode #129 Puppy Kindergarten & Sit to Say Please

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Episode #129 Puppy Kindergarten & Sit to Say Please · The Puppy Training Podcast

• 0:00
  Amy: This is the puppy training Podcast, episode 129 Puppy kindergarten this podcast is designed to help you on your journey of becoming best friends through love and learning as you train your own dog from home, and I'm here to help you every step of the way.
• 0:19
  Amy: This is the puppy training podcast. And I'm your host, Amy Jensen. Hey, everybody, how are you this week. I hope you are doing fantastic. It's the middle of January. And we're doing well here in Utah freezing cold weather but beautiful snow. And Baxter and I have enjoyed many adventures outside. Bruno, my older dog is wearing a coat around because he's so cold. But he's doing great too. Today I want to talk about our version of puppy kindergarten. I don't know if everybody out there understands or knows that we teach courses. So we have six week courses for basic training, which is our version of puppy kindergarten. We have intermediate training, and an AKC Canine Good Citizen course.
• 1:03
  Amy: We launched last year a junior course meaning we teach it just for kids. So we invite kids to come to that one. And then we have an advanced course. So we train a lot of therapy dogs, professionally, my trainers and I trained service dogs. So we can coach you on how to do that if you're interested in training your own dog. And in the advanced course, you learn some of those behaviors that we do with those dogs. So today, I want to focus on our basic training, which is our puppy kindergarten course, and explain what it is and what your dog will learn in it. And then at the end, I want to teach you one of those basic behaviors that we learned in that course, which is so valuable. If you have a new puppy or you're getting a new dog soon, no matter their age, this is a great skill to teach any dog to help with their behavior. Before I get started at explaining what's in our course, I want you to understand that these are all online. So I teach these via zoom, I have a couple of trainers now that are helping with the basic and intermediate courses as well. So you'll get a variety of trainers in a variety of time zones, and times days and times. We try to mix those up and vary them to accommodate as many people as we can. But we recognize we serve clientele worldwide. So we have clients in Australia and the UK and the US anywhere they speak English really. And so we understand that. And we try to rotate these times and days that we offer things. But if you can't make it live, we record them. And they are posted on our site in our membership. So you can watch them on demand anytime. For instance, if you know what we are teaching Thursdays at 4pm. And that doesn't work for you, you can go hit the recording, hit play anytime you'd like watch it, go through it as if it's live with your dog in your own home. And then if you have questions, we have avenues for you to get answers to those questions, even with one on one sessions with our trainers before you take the course the next week. So from week to week, you're welcome to meet with our trainers in between, you can email us questions, you can set up a phone call, you can set up a video call. And we are happy to coach you through anything that you're struggling with until you come to class the next week. So that's how we do things here at Baxter & Bella, it's worked fantastically well for 1000s of families. It's super fun to get to meet people from all over the globe and see you in your homes working with your puppies, and you get to watch us demoing with dogs at our house. So that's how we teach our courses. It's all via zoom all online, you never have to drive anywhere. You don't have to come home from work and then get your shoes back on and head out somewhere to go to a class. It's all online. And if you can't make it live, you can watch the recordings on demand. And we never take those off our site.
• 3:48
  Amy: They're available anytime. Now, that said, Absolutely. Yes, it is worthwhile to sign up for a local class as well. We highly advocate for that, just so your puppy gets to get out and meet other puppies. If you don't want to sign up for a class or course in your local area. Then check out you know opportunities to set up playdates for your puppy.
• 4:06
  Amy: Maybe there's a neighbor who got a puppy or a dog that's about your dog, same age, same energy level. And maybe you can see if they get along and if they get along. That's great. You can get them together to play and socialize. Because that's valuable too. But we do find that information wise coming to our classes and courses learning what you need to be able to do and practicing it in your own home while you watch us do it on screen is very valuable.
• 4:33
  Amy: Alright, let's talk about what you will get when you come to basic training. So in sight of our basic training course, we start out with the basic the basic prep stuff, right like a successful schedule building a bond. We help you introduce a crate how to put on a leash without getting puppy biting all over you or taking off the leash without the same thing happening. We introduced you to marker training. This is like clicker training, if you're familiar with clicker training, or you may use a verbal cue, we prefer a verbal yes as our marker. And we show you how to do that. Whether you want to use a clicker or a verbal marker, we teach you that concept. We also teach your puppy the word no, and interrupter words, we focus on attention, how to teach your puppy their name. And a big part of basic training is focusing on motivation. How do we motivate your dog to want to train to want to learn to want to play these games with us, because most of our training, we make fun and game like, and we want our puppy to want to participate. So motivation is a big part of that first week of our basic training course. Okay, then we go into set to say, please. And using a target hand, basically, we teach you how to show your puppy what you want them to do, rather than having them always guess or you reacting to what they do, we would much rather you set your puppy up for success and show them what to do. Versus I'm just going to react once they've done something I don't want them to do. So we teach you that in basic training and focus a lot on that concept helping you to start to think that way, we find that a lot of this is just getting your brain to think in a different way. Right? It's some of it's counterintuitive, maybe to naturally and so we want you to start to think like a trainer. And to set your puppy up for success. Always be thinking how can I make this easier for my puppy? How can I make sure they understand what it is I'm asking for? And then that relationship component of Hey, puppy, how are you feeling right now because it's not always, let's do this one, I want to do it right. All right, so then we go into the next second week of our course, you'll come and we'll practice things like sit down stay will introduce a release cue. So your puppy knows when they can get up out of a stay. We teach them a basic recall, and a cue for that, as well as basic leash walking, we introduce a leash, a lot of people with leash walking and think, Oh, I have a dog, I need to walk them around the block. And we encourage you in this basic training course to just take some time, we'll wait we'll get to the point where your puppy has the skills to walk around the block. But right now we're going to do level one of Leash training, which is Hey, puppy, this is a leash. This is how we walk on it. This is how we move together as a team. And we have some rules there that we teach our puppies. So the third week we'll talk about watch me touch going back to that target hand, we'll put that on cue. We like to teach the dogs how to wait. So a boundary training if you will, where they wait at the doorway or they wait at the door of their kennel to come out. We also introduce leave it because as we start to explore out and about, especially outdoors, a lot of opportunities come up for leave it. I would say indoors too, though, I guess if we have families with kids and toys around the house, socks seem to be something that most dogs gravitate towards. And the smelly are the better for some reason. So we definitely teach a leave it and how to teach an implied lever as well so that you're not always having to tell your dog to leave it but they figure out I should probably not get that. And then the fourth week we go into proofing behavior. So now that we've introduced a stay, we've been practicing it for several weeks, we're going to start talking about how do I now prove this behavior. That is more advanced behavior, I say intermediate behavior that we do cover in our intermediate course, but we introduce it in the basic level so that you're aware of what's coming. We'll also talk about drop, it will play some games.
• 8:37
  Amy: And we talk about phasing out the food floors, we want to make sure that you understand the process of how to train a behavior. And that yeah, we might start by lowering our puppy, which means we're showing them some food and we're guiding them into position. And we do that several times. And then we introduce a que word. And then we start to lose the lore. So we start to drop out that assistance. Our hands are now empty, we don't have food in them. We're marking Yes, and then our hand is reaching for payment. And we're transitioning from you know bribing our puppy to do something to pay them to do a good behavior. And we get to that pretty quickly. So we teach you that pattern of anytime you want to teach your dog a new behavior, any new behavior, we teach the behavior first meaning we show the puppy how to do it. And that often involves what we call luring.
• 9:26
  Amy: And then once they know how to do it, we add the cue. Once they learn the cue, we drop out the showing part of that and now we say the cue they know what is wanted, they do it we pay them and that payment keeps the motivation high. So we are a rewards based training facility.
• 9:47
  Amy: So that is what you'll find in our puppy kindergarten. It is very comprehensive. Again, it's six weeks each week is about an hour long and then I stay after and we answer about 1520 30 minutes of any of your questions. didn't set you have based on the content that we presented that day. So the recordings are probably about an hour and a half with questions at the end. And we find it to be super valuable. Well, that's our basic training. In a nutshell.
• 10:11
  Amy: Now I want to dive into one of those concepts that we teach, which is sit to say, Please, let me give you a little exercise that you can take today and work on with your own dog to just improve their manners a little so set to say please to us is just the nice way for our dog to ask for things. If my dog would like attention, or for me to throw a toy, or they want to go outside, I prefer that they sit to ask versus barking at me or jumping at me, which can be cute, sometimes I know. But I prefer a nice, simple, polite set to say please. So here's how you teach it. If you can get something that motivates your puppy, this could be food, this could be a toy, it can be a game that you like to play, a toy and food probably work the best in the beginning, but then we can advance this to where we're using other types of motivation.
• 11:02
  Amy: So let's just say that we're going to get a little piece of food, I'm going to take a few steps away from my puppy, the more quickly you do this, the more exciting you are, the more than they want to follow you, as they come towards you, I want you to take that piece of food, put it out at their nose level heights, so I don't want to up above them or down below them necessarily just meet them where their nose naturally is. And then I want you to slowly lower them up into a sit. So you're going to take that piece of food, raise it just slightly above their nose to their foreheads, where they look up at the ceiling. And then they go into a sit the second they sit we mark yes, we pay them the piece of food. And then I want you to repeat that I want you to take two or three quick steps away from your dog, I want you to meet them out in front of you. So your arm is outstretched, you're not meeting them at your feet, you're meeting them, one to two feet out in front of your feet. Okay, so your puppies coming towards you. You see them coming, you meet them out in front of you with your target hand, you lower them into a sit we mark yes, we pay them. And then I want you to repeat that again. So two to three steps away, we meet them out in front of us as they approach us, we lure them into a sit. So now you're getting this pattern of I'm moving away, my puppy is running to me, they sit, they run to me, they sit, they run to me they sit and you can start to add in more and more steps away, you can make this more exciting. In the beginning, we want to keep it very simple. We want our puppy to win often so that they want to keep playing. But you can progress to harder and harder levels of this as your puppy gets better. So this is how you introduce the concept of sit to say please notice I'm not cueing my dog to sit, I'm not saying the word. I'm teaching my puppy that that's the pattern. I move away, they run to a person they sit, they get payment, they run to a person they sit, they get payment. That's what I want my puppy to start to clue in on.
• 12:56
  Amy: And then we'll practice with other people, right, I'll have my children come and help I'll have my husband join in. I'll have them practice with my children's friends. I'll have some, you know, people come over to my house and we'll practice maybe I'll have people come to my backyard and we'll practice and we teach you in our program, how to manage that and how to set your puppies up for success so that they're not just running up and jumping all over people before we they know what to do right before they know how to behave in greeting somebody. But the concept is we're teaching our puppy a pattern. We're teaching them to run to a person they sit, and then good things happen. All right, you guys, I want you to give that a try. Let me know how it goes. You can find us on social media Instagram at Baxter & Bella, you can find us on Facebook, you can find us on YouTube. Ideally, we hope that you'll join us in our online puppy school and come see what we have to offer. Sign up for a class sign up for a course. We have a lot of good things there for you and hope to see you soon. If you have a question about anything you heard on this podcast or any other Puppy Training question, visit my site Baxter & bella.com to contact me