This video is going to be mainly me talking as a voiceover and explaining
how I've taught my assistance dog how to heel
I hope you enjoyed my animation and this is me just showing you in video format
what it actually looks like for the u-shape to come off your dog's back as
soon as it does this I am just turning around and walking in the opposite
direction and encouraging my dog to follow
good girl what I'm demonstrating in this video is that my dog is able to recall
from a stay position into the heel so she knows how to get to that heel
position from all different types of angles I say the word heel but I also
have a hand gesture so that I can ask her for heel without having to say
anything here I'm just asking her fro down stay and I'm going to recall her to
my heel and here I'm just demonstrating how your dog may follow you around on a
loose leash this is not heeling but it's a good skill to have when you're just
taking a casual walk she was pretty tired in this video as well so you can
see she was lagging behind a little bit
here I'm demonstrating how your dog should be able to sit when you stop this
shows kind of like a level of focus just by itself so I'm going to turn and ask
summer to wait and then follow me from behind into a heel position and then set
when I stop
summers pretty good at this now so she knows not to go ahead of me so I was
having to encourage her in these videos and hence why I'm kind of pointing and
telling it to go get a treat that was on the floor
if you see summer looking over at the bench at all there was a group of
teenagers with very young excitable dogs and they were trying to teach the dogs
to roll over hence why Summer seems very distracted by them and I thought this
was a great training opportunity because it demonstrated how I use this in real life
You can see here she's very eager to go
up to these dogs or greet them completely distracted and I encouraged
her back to me she doesn't fully come to heel so I take
another turn she sits nicely unfocused so I give her a reward for that and
slowly through this I'll decrease the distance between her in this distraction
and I'm turning again because she is very distracted comes to heel nicely and
I reward her for giving me a focus
Maybe I push her a bit too far and she gets
very distracted so I do the same again I continue doing this probably about 15
times until she properly starts to settle this was maybe the tenth time
that she had done this she could go a bit closer and come back nicely
so the key with this kind of training and heel training is that whatever
stimulus that they're going to be distracted by or excited by you have to
do pretty intense desensitization to it otherwise no
matter how much you practice at home with a nice heel you're going to get a
situation which just completely surprises you
I'm not pulling on my
dog's collar I'm not doing anything drastic I'm not giving her any
Corrections and I'm simply teaching her that the thing that gets her food in
this situation is for her to follow me in a particular position
it takes quite a lot of patience to do this kind of stuff and you've got to be
in the right mindset and if you start getting frustrated at your dog you just
take a breather come back to the situation make a note of what the
distraction was so that you can actively set some time aside to go and conquer
that distraction so I decided to take the plunge hare and take Summer off
lead and I was pretty confident that she wasn't going to run up to these people
other dogs at this point and my dog is a bit of a strange case and she definitely
works better off lead than on lead and she uses a sort of some sort of a
security blanket also all of these noises that are going off in the
background they're not side effects they're noises from the actual video
clip and it was a really high distraction environment for her and I
feel like once most dogs can heel in their favorite Park to play and be off
leash and they can heal pretty much anywhere
I think it's important to remember that no matter what techniques or tools that
somebody recommends to you and your dog you have to find what works best for you
you know my dog works best in this situation
so here I'm giving her a heel command because she starts straying a little bit
clearly highly distracted but she did really well I'm proud of her and she
sits and focuses and that's why we ended the training session