Teach Your Puppy to Stay

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and today we’re going to talk about puppies. Now it’s time to teach this little puppy how to stay. Now puppies don’t have a real long attention span so be patient and move slowly. What you want to do is teach the puppy to sit or lie down and then have them do that command for progressively longer periods of time. Barto has offered me a down. Now a lot of people like to use a hand signal when they say the word stay that can help the dog, because it’s a visual signal. You can also just make stay inherent in the command. With this puppy I’m going to go ahead and teach him the stay. Stay. I’m going to gradually introduce some distractions… and make sure I have my treats ready… uh, now there I had to do a no reward marker because he broke when he saw the cheese and getting back into his down, good, stay, so we know up that the crinkling in the cheese wrapper is a little too much of a distraction for him at this point. So I’m going to have him prepare myself by having enough ready for him. You always want to set your dog up to succeed. Don’t make things too difficult at first or you will only have failure. Down. Good. When he looks up, sit, good, down. This puppy is brilliant. Stay, good, good. Now there I marked when he made eye contact because that was very nice. What I also learned from the last two interactions with him when he broke the stay command is that I need to reinforce more quickly. I just made that same mistake again. No freebies. Sit, good, down, good. Notice there are two I said the down command a little bit more quickly than I’ve done it in the past, it’s because I can tell he’s catching on. Stay, good. Again, gradual distractions, giving reinforcement often enough that he stays down, then you make the reinforcement periods longer and longer in between and that’s how this puppy will learn how to stay. "