Hi everyone! This video is on the topic of teaching your dog a calm settle like
you see my dogs doing here. Even when the treat bag is out and rustling they know
that if they just relax and chill the treats are coming to them and they're
going to be highly reinforced for just chilling. Hey Wishy? There you go. If you
have a dog that's extremely over aroused and gets easily frustrated around food
it can seem counterintuitive to use food to help teach your dog to relax. Now if
you were to just train a down-stay or a duration go to a mat, what could happen
is that frustration and arousal over food can be extremely hard to get rid of
but what you can do instead and what I suggest as the first step to teaching
this calm settle around food is to have treats around your house on counters, in
jars, that are easy to access or have low value treats in a bait bag on your
person and you're just going to walk around the house going about your daily
business and when you see your dog relax, say he just plops down in the kitchen
and he's not thinking about the food, then you're going to calmly and slowly walk
over to him and drop a treats between his paws or use a calm marker like "good"
or "yep" and then calmly go and drop a treat between his paws. Now what this is
going to do, is you're going to be reinforcing your dog for calmly settling
around your house so it's a technique called capturing, where you see the
behavior that you want and you reinforce it with a treat. Now what will happen at
first is that most likely your dog will pop up and expect more treats especially
if you do training with treats and he's used to getting lots of treats one after
the other or eating a whole meal so you feed your dog a treat you show them that
you have no more treats and then you go about your business and
really convince your dog that that was just a one-off treat for
relaxing and what's going to happen is that your dog
isn't going to then after getting one treat have that expectation that more
treats are coming and that frustration and arousal about "when am I going to get
my next treat?" and this is going to help extremely to calm your dog around
food, so the food being present isn't the predictor that you're suddenly going to
do exciting stuff and get excited it's about being calm and relaxed. Now a
lot of people think also that if you use food to help calm your dog down, that
they then are going to be slower when you use food to do behaviors and tricks
and as you might have seen on my youtube channel, that's simply not true.
You can get a lot of speed and enthusiasm using treats but you can use
a different treat delivery, so for example if I want my dog to do exciting
heel work where my dog is really amped up and looking beautiful and with a tail
flagging, I can use the treat in a different way than I use it for teaching
calm behaviors like this settle. For some of my clients I suggest doing this
exercise for at least five days before you even start any sort of initial
training, as what can happen is if you start trying to train with food when a
dog is very excited and frustrated about food you can kind of create a habit that
the dog gets frustrated as soon as you start training and gets overexcited.
So simply for five days not focusing on training your dog but simply reinforcing
those moments that your dog lays down and relaxes is really going to set you
up for success to have a dog that's not getting frustrated during training
over not getting the food fast enough and not only is this great for us as
humans but I really think that it's in the dog's best interest because if we're
going to be using food to get behavior and for them it's a stressful
frustrating experience that's simply not fair in my opinion and working on this
is really going to help the dogs out to learn how to live with us and learn how
to deal with our type of training that we want to do with them. Hey Splashers?
The way that I initially learned how to train the settle was using capturing
where you put your dog on a leash and harness and you simply wait until the
dog relaxes and settles and then you can calmly drop a treat or use a calm marker
such as "good" before you drop the treat and reinforce that calm behavior. However
I found when helping people online where I can't be there to help them or it's a
person who has no training background and really needs help to teach their dog
to relax on a mat I found it very beneficial to actually use luring to
train this calm behavior and get it started. So what I train is teaching the
dog to go to the mat and lay down. So one way of doing this is simply giving the
dog a treat and then luring the dog onto the mat and then into the down position
"good" and then calmly releasing the treats in between the dog's paws like
this. yYou can also add a release cue such as "free" and I have a video on YouTube on
how to train your dog to go to his bed and I'll link that in the description
below because you can even send your dog away to go and relax on a mat or as you
might have noticed I have some dogs lined up here I can send them to go and
relax and wait their turn while another dog is working and even
though I utilized the lure and you could even use a clicker to train this
behavior, you can see that you can then reinforce calmness during this behavior
using that method of simply dropping a treat calmly between the dogs paws for
relaxing where you want them to relax and there's actually four dogs up here.
The wonderful thing about teaching your new dog or puppy a
long-duration settle behavior is that it makes it extremely easy to then teach a
long duration down stay because the dog is used to having to wait calmly without
getting frustrated before getting his next treat so simply not receiving a
treat doesn't make the dog feel like they did something wrong and they need to change their behavior such as offer different behaviors
or come running to you to say "hey what's going on? I've been laying here for so
long something must be up!" So I really like to
teach the settle for many reasons and one of them actually is to train long
duration behaviors where the dog is static. You can add a verbal cue to the
settling behavior, so for me when the dog is settling on a mat I simply say "go to
your mat" and that just means that you stay on the mat and relax on it until
you get a release or you can have a situational cue that anytime the dog is
on leash and you're standing for a long period of time or sitting for a long
period of time that is the cue to settle or you can have a verbal cue to tell
your dog to relax and settle such as "settle" or Grisha Stuart uses the cue
"relax" which i think is a really lovely cue. Now we're practicing the same
exercise with the dog on a leash and harness next to a chair with the dog's
mat below the chair. "free" So what I am doing is walking towards the chair and
as the dog reaches the mat I'm cueing the dog to lay down. So you could
actually turn the mat into the cue to lay down and that is simply by repeating
this exercise multiple times and then not giving the down cue and seeing if
the dog might offer laying down on the mat. And then with this behavior you want
to be very slow and calm when you deliver the treats. You don't want to be
throwing them or throwing them to reset the dog, because that can get the dog
really excited about the treats when you want your dog to be calm. "Halo free" So
there he just offered the behavior. "good" Once your dog is offering laying down on
the mat or after you say your cue, you can then sit in a chair with your dog on
a leash and harness with the mat below you and anytime you notice your dog
relaxing and not staring at your food, you can mark and reinforce your dog. Now
for some dogs this can be extremely difficult if you're in your own house
with absolutely no distractions because it looks very much like a training
session, when you have food on you, you're used to
training your dog and getting your dog to focus on you a hundred percent and
expect that food is coming. So I suggest for the average person that when you get
to this step of sitting in a chair and trying to reinforce your dog for not
thinking about the food, like that, I suggest doing it outside somewhere
that's not too exciting or too distracting for your dog, where they
might be stressed and not want to take food, so maybe your backyard where
there's some noises happening but your dog is still able to train with you and
what you can do is utilize those distractions as the moment to mark and
reinforce your dog for relaxing calmly. So here inside the house what can easily
happen is that the dog can learn "Oh it's about looking away" and then you get your
dog offering you these ways of getting you to reinforce them by looking to the
left or kicking a leg so it looks like they're relaxing, when really they're
thinking "how do I get that next treat?" So to use the treats to reinforce the dog
for being calm around the food and not fixating on the food, going out to a
distracting location where your dog is going to naturally look to the left to
hear a noise or smell a smell or if you're working in the house your dog
actually is starting to lay down and take a nap and rest their chin on their
paws, you can reinforce it. But when you see your dog starting to offer you
little behaviors like tapping his chin down on the ground to get you to give
him a treat, then you want to make sure that you're not reinforcing those
behaviors. If you go somewhere and your dog is a little bit stressed so you've
gone to a cafe and your dog isn't thinking to just relax at your feet,
you can revert back to luring your dog into the position, giving them an initial
treat and then marking every time they notice a distraction and you can also
calmly pet your dog if that helps calm your dog down. So not petting like this
like most people like to pet their dog when they're feeling a little bit
nervous or worried about their dog's behavior,
you want to make sure that when you're petting your dog to help calm your dog
down that your hands are still or moving extremely slowly. So you can just rest
your hand on your dog to help calm him down or move it extremely slowly across
your dog's body. Sometimes sighing and blinking your eyes when your dog looks
at you can help them to calm down in a new environment because they're seeing
that you're calm and relaxed in that environment. Hey pupsee? So here we are,
we've added in some handling into the settle and he looks pretty sleepy right
now. His eyes are blinking softly and slowly and the muscles in his body are
very loose. I think he might actually fall asleep. "Good" And I can mark and then
drop the treat between his paws. Sometimes it's easier to just move and
drop the treat between their paws but using a calm marker that's always
associated with calm movements is a great idea. I don't suggest using the
clicker for this exercise, however if you use the clicker to train extremely calm
behaviors it's really not going to matter but I prefer if you're out and
about, to just calmly drop the treat between your dog's paws and that way if
you're talking to someone at a cafe you don't have to draw attention to your
training but also with that clicker, if you have a prehistory of doing lots of
training with the clicker, hearing that clicker can get the dog into training
mode where they're thinking "hmm... what do I need to do next to get that treat?"
Where with the calm settle, you're basically reinforcing your dog for
relaxing on his own and the great thing about that is that your dog is going to
start choosing to do that and when you stop marking and
giving food, they're going to enjoy settling at your feet
when on a leash and harness without having to have treats all the time like
my other dogs are doing over there and they've been settled for maybe an hour
because I've had to do some retakes of this video, so the great
thing is that you're teaching them how to enjoy relaxing. Thank you so much for
watching! If you'd like to support my work don't forget to Like, Comment and
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I greatly appreciate your support for making videos like this one to educate
the general public on how to train dogs without the use of physical and
psychological intimidation. See you later guys!