How to Train an Italian Setter to Stay

"Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and we’re going to work with a Bracco Italiano also known as an Italian setter. And we’re working with the Bracco Italiano, we’re going to teach her to stay. Now we’ve discovered that she loves this hedgehog. So I’m going to use the hedgehog as a reward to get her to stay for longer, longer periods of time. We’ll work with the sit first. Sit, good, now I don’t want to squeak the hedgehog because that would be too much, but instead, I simply keep her attention with it then I release her before she gets up. The reason I’m moving around a little bit is to just create some distraction. She’s doing a very good job. She’s very intent. Okay, good girl, so let her play with it a little bit, good. I don’t want to take it from her mouth, so I’m glad that she dropped it. If she did not want to give it up by the way, I would have traded it for a treat, it worked on the drop command. Good, okay, sit, good. Now the reason I let her up there and then repeated the command is that she offered the first sit, but I want to work on the stay. Now, notice that I’m not using the word stay, we don’t use stay at Taurus Training because it’s really redundant. Your dog should obey your command until you release them and give them another command. A lot of people like to use the word stay, if you do, it’s no problem, you can even use a hand signal like this. The visual signals really help the dog down. Now I’m introducing a few more distractions by moving around, if she gets up, I’ll use some body language as a correction, ump… try to get her back where she was, sit, good, and then repeat the command for reinforcement. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the pre-training videos on how to give commands. Okay, so we have some success teaching this Italian setter how to stay."