Use Food Rewards when Teaching Your Dog to Stay

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is Elise McMahon for Expert Village and today we are talking about how to teach your dog a reliable stay. If you would like to find out more about my services you can visit my website at canineheadstart.com. So we are going to be talking now about using food rewards with your behavioral marker to let your dog get rewarded for having done something right. This is all in preparation to begin teaching the dog to stay. So for a food reward, you can teach for a stay, you can use any kind of food reward really. You can use a hand full of kibble like I have got here. You can use cheese, chicken, liver, treats you might want to stay away from your store bought dog treats. They often have a lot of color, additives and other things in them, sugars and a lot of salt. You might want to stay away from. So I have actually students that use Cheerios. They make a great dog snack and they are fairly healthy for your dog. So you really can use anything. In the stay we are not so worried about using high quality treats, high value treats to the dog, so kibble is fine or any kind of crunchy biscuit is fine. So how do we use food when we are working with the stay? Ursa this way…Sit… I am using my behavior marker… good girl… rewarding her with food. I am going to ask her to stay; just move back a little bit. While she is still staying I mark her and reward her. Good girl… praise her and then okay, I release her. So it’s very important when you are using the food reward that you reward the dog in the position that you’ve asked them to stay in. You do not use your food reward after you have already released them because if you do that you rewarding them you are giving them the cookie for being released and that’s not the message we want to get across to the dog. We want to get the message to the dog that you get this reward when you hold this position."