Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and today we’re going to talk about training dogs. We’re now teaching Rottweilers how to stay. Ursa, a sweet, sweet responsive Rottweiler, has been our model today, and we’re going to work on the stay in the context of the down; because her sit is pretty darn good, but her down stay… not so hot. Ursa, good, down, good. Let’s get her off that haunch. Now, with any behavior, you want to start with few distractions and then gradually build up. So your dog can do a down stay when you go to an outdoor restaurant. If your dog has a good reliable down stay you can take her anywhere, and it really enriches your and her life. So what I’m going to do is start moving around a little bit and be creating a distraction. She also has a fly buzzing around her head, which is helpful in the distraction department. I’m going to hide my treats because she’s intent on those. Now she’s being very, very good so, I can up the ante a little bit, yippee, woohoo, ump… down, down, good. So, I used a no reward marker when she got up, and used the combination of body language and a little tiny bit of physical nudging to help her know what I wanted her to do. So you want to try to catch them before they get all the way up, alright, here’s the big distraction, good, excellent. So by throwing the treat close to her, I’m actually rewarding her for staying down. Good girl, good girl, keep rewarding her for staying down, ump, good. Now that was a really good illustration, because she started to get up and I was able to correct her and catch her before she did, that’s setting her up to succeed. So, this Rottweiler really knows how to stay.
