Teaching your dog to target and tap your hand, and to back up on cue = walking backwards in a straight line, have a number of useful real life applications: both cues prompt ‘four on the floor’ with dogs who love to use their humans as a springboard (with jumping on unfamiliar people or ones who don’t like to interact with your dog, don’t permit close access with the help of the leash), and with the hand-touch game they also experience that a closed-mouth tap is more rewarding that mouthing. Either actions typically works with an excited dog than asking her to sit because it involves movement. Being still is as hard for them as it is for excited children, and some adults.
Hand-targeting is super easy to teach:
Put a few small smelly treats in one hand and make a fist. Switch hands—the hand that held the treats becomes the target hand. It’s about the tap not the food, but at this introduction phase it helps draw your dog’s nose to a hand that smells enticing. The moment you feel your dog’s snout on your hand, give him a treat out of the other hand, so the non-target hand.
You want to mark the tap-moment with a “yes” or a clicker because the action is fleeting and you want your dog to understand that it’s about the tap, that the tap makes the food happen. Repeat, repeat…
You know that your dog has connected the dots when she briefly taps your hand and shifts her focus right away to the hand that holds the treats.
If you dog licks your target hand because it smells of food, at first still reinforce, but once she’s made the link insist on the tap. And no teeth allowed.
Hurdle: for some dogs gesture of palm-to-dog is the signal to sit or shake a paw. If that’s the case, start the with the back of your hand and, once your dog understands the new game, shift to the palm. Only because palm is more natural for us. Never use a fist.
The progressions are: changing hands, moving your hand farther away from your dog, raising it for a jump, requesting 2,3,4… touches before you give a treat. One thing at a time. Then see if you can eliminate treats altogether and make targeting a game. In other words, play with it and have fun.
The Benefits:
Aside from channeling jumping and dealing, once your palm-toward-dog is the signal for your dog to tap your hand, you can play hand games: jump over a log, weave around a tree or table leg, two paws on a stool or park bench, and so on. Be creative. With many dogs that becomes a reward in it’s own right and can take the place of food treats as a reinforcement.
3-year-olds can get involved and move the dog away from their body and face. The dog learns to appropriately interact with young kids; and kids that it’s not always hands-on petting—which many dogs aren’t too keen on.
Rewarding the closed-mouth tap curbs, normal for puppies, mouthing, but it also teaches pup and older dogs that there is a way they can communicate a need without using teeth.
Playing hand games makes hands feel safe for dogs who don’t trust hands.
The familiarity of the game, like anything that is familiar and elicits a positive emotional response, can recenter a dog when he feels uneasy. Because playing also relaxes the human, there is no added tension transfer.
Once the hand has become a focal point, the person can get through a dicey situation.
Because this hand-target game is familiar and fun, it can playfully move a dog who resists over or off furniture. At the moment it makes it safe: the person defused the tension of the space-guarding dog. Longterm, dealing with that requires the help of an experienced behavior expert.
Back Up--My verbal cue for our dogs was beep-beep.
Purposes:
As said, together with hand-targeting to direct your dog from jumping on you, but back up works a lot better when you carry groceries or have a baby in your arms.
With a trained “beep-beep” children can prompt a dog away from their body instead of pushing them with their hands. Our granddaughter was 14 months old when she did exactly that, verbally with “beep-beep” but also using the hand signal she saw us do before. Bowie, our border collie, listened to her and backed away—because it was well rehearsed and he loved the game. Had our granddaughter pushed him it would have been safe. There was no bite risk with Bowie, but that’s not the case with every dog who is pushed. Plus, hands-off is teaching kids to be respectful.
You can be the one prompting your dog to increase the distance to someone who is nervous of him, but also if your dog finds himself too close to someone and feels unsafe but is at that moment mentally stuck what to do. Dogs who are conflicted about people often are compelled to sniff them to gather information, but then can lose courage and tense up. Or the person is doing something that makes the dog nervous: looming, reaching a hand out, pat.
Along that line, you can prompt your dog to back away from the encroaching fast-moving toddler. Ensure that your dog always has room to back up. However, don’t always make your dog back away, but move the toddler.
One of my cases involved three dogs in a household. One of them was resource insecure and perceived the other two as rivals. For safety reasons all three dogs were leashed when treats came into the mix—except when I taught back up. The leashes could come off because two of the dogs learned that backing away was more rewarding than pushing in, which in turn relaxed the resource insecure dog.
“Beep-Beep” is yet another cue I can use to help my dog when he is in conflict; it allows me to direct him, to fill his brain with something he can do, which lowers distress.
Periodically playing back and forth beep-beep dances where you back up and your dog follows and then you cue her and she follow you is a lot of fun, and once familiar can function as a well-rehearsed emergency turn and walk away from a trigger your dog might overreact to.
How to teach it:
Some dogs back up automatically when someone walks toward them.
If your dog doesn’t, or sits right away, lure her. Your dog must be standing for this, and you are facing your dog. Hold a treat between thumb and index fingers close to her mouth and very gentle push her. Release the treat the moment you see the back legs move. Make sure that you do not release a treat for sitting. The target behavior is moving—backing up increasingly more steps. With dogs who default sit because they’ve learned all their life that nothing good happens unless they sit you might have to reinforce standing first for a week or two, then try the back up. Of course stop asking your dog to sit for everything.
Caveat: even gentle pressure is too much for some dogs and they become nervous. If that’s your dog, sandwich one back-up exercise into actions she knows and likes, and make that one back up very reinforcing. Trust me, I never met a dog who didn’t love the game once they know it.
Most dogs quickly make the connection that backing up, not sitting, is wanted. Reinforce the first step backward, then after 2,3,4 steps, and so on. Once your dog offers that action to score a treat, name it as it occurs. For example “beep-beep”. With a continuous “beep-beep-beep” you can back her up farther and farther.
With the verbal cue in place, change the context: stand beside him, have your back turned, sit on the sofa, ask your dog to beep-beep while you are standing still or backing up. Then incorporate object, the door, a toy, people. I once asked Bowie to back away from a hare. I wish I had filmed it. But I didn’t. So you’ll have to make due with Bowie’s slow walk-up to his disc.
Love this!!!!