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Summary: Training a dog to stay entails teaching a dog to sit still through distance, duration and distractions, and remember to use positive reinforcement and short sessions. Teach a dog to stay with a certified dog trainer in this free video on dog obedience.
Nancy Cusick is Austin's premier dog trainer and animal handler with more than 12 years of experience.read more
"Hello, my name is Nancy Cusick, and I'm a professional dog trainer in Austin, Texas. You can visit my website at trainmydogs.com. We're going to show you today how to begin to teach your dog to stay. Stay is a pretty complex behavior simply because there are three parts. You have duration, distance, distractions. We're going to teach you each part separately starting with duration. So, whenever you're teaching your puppy to sit or to lay down, you want to teach them to stay there for longer and longer periods of time, that's duration. So, I'm not moving, I'm just waiting, free. I want to be very clear to my dog that they're aloud to get up. So, we're going to use a release word, and in this case, we're going to use the word free, okay. So, I'm just going to stand here and this is Raina doing a stay for duration. Free, good girl, good job. Okay, so once Raina understands that she is supposed to sit there for longer periods of time, the second part that we want to add to our stay word is adding in distance which means that I move and you sit there. So, I'm going to show Raina that I'm going to start moving. Yes, just a little teetering back and forth to show her you sit there. If your dog gets up, just put him back down and start all over. Free, good girl, good job. Free, good girl. Now, that Raina's starting to show the behavior, we can start adding our word. If your dog doesn't know how to do the behavior and you're not really seeing it, I don't suggest you adding your word until you truly think that you could bet money that your dog is going to do it. Raina. The hand signal for stay is going to be a flat palm, turning around, jumping, free, good girl. Sit, stay. If they're not ready for the big movements backwards, do small steps and come back and reward and bigger and reward and bigger. Free, good job, good job. After lots of practice of this, Raina will start knowing what stay means pretty quickly. You want to keep these sessions short and sweet. Remember, that dogs have short attention spans and stay is kind of boring. So, keep it short and sweet and move on to something else. Lots of play is important."
eHow Article: How to Train Your Dog to Stay
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