Wall-e's startline stay

I worked on the Control Unleashed method of teaching (and maintaining) startline stays with Wall-e this morning. Control Unleashed is AWESOME, and I would definitely recommend it for anyone with a reactive dog, or even a puppy because a lot of the exercises are great for foundation training.

I used (and still use) very similar exercises to many of the CU exercises, to bring Mika's reactivity to other dogs down a notch, especially the concept of looking at other dogs to be rewarded. That was a huge part of her reactivity training. She used to be very reactive to other dogs, but now I can manage it.

So anyway, back to today. I worked on Wall-e's stays. He's been breaking his stays occasionally. Not very often, but enough. I don't want it to turn into a problem, so he's had a few stay-training sessions in the past couple weeks. He sits in front of a jump, and I reward, giving him his stay cue as I feed him. I walk ahead beside the jump, lift my arm and tense my body, and go back to reward when he stays. In the first two sessions he broke his stay a few times, but this morning he never broke in the 4 reps that we did! He's learned that when I raise my arm, it doesn't always mean that I'm about to release him.

The point of the exercise is to disconnect the jump from the stay. Dogs break because they're anticipating the obstacle in front of them, but if they don't know which reward they'll be getting (either food/toy or the jump), they'll stay because they don't know what to anticipate.

~Nat