"Go Through" Doorway and Reorient to Handler (Patreon)

Hey Ya'll! In honor of my revolving door video last week, here's some more door training! 

This is another training session taken from my coursework for my Atlas Service Dog Trainer Certification and is considered a foundation skill. 

Training Objective: In this session we will introduce the concept of going through a door and re-orienting to handler using a hand touch. Our goal will be to add the cue and get CoolWhip going through the doorway on the verbal cue without the need for the soft lure, but offer the touch once she goes through to help with the re-orientation portion of the goal. Ideally we would like to fade the need for the hand touch but that may not happen within one session.

Why Train This? Having a dog that can go through a doorway and reorient is necessary in some public access settings, especially in tight spaces. Training this behavior can also help with dogs who tend to get excited about crossing thresholds and distracted by new environments. When you have a pattern that you follow, this can make transitions easier. You can also generalize this to getting out of the car. Dog exits car and immediately orients to handler. 

Stage of Behavior: Introducing. While CoolWhip obviously knows to go through a door as a matter of daily life, it is typically a “wait” and “free” situation at home without any re-orientation, and a heeling situation out in public, so going though first and reorienting will be new to her.

Background: Eric does not work with CoolWhip pretty much at all because she’s my dog, and she tends to be less forgiving of errors. It was fun to see them work together on these last two assignments.

What Could I Have Done Differently? If I had thought more about the actual cue, I would have gotten rid of the “go” portion of it. You’ll notice in some of the first reps with Eric, when he says “go” she gets lost. This is because “go” is her cue to go out in frisbee. Because of that I would get rid of the “go” and just say “through”.

I also haven’t taught this before so I was less comfortable with it. So when Eric asked about which direction, I hadn’t had enough experience to know which would be best. I should have practiced beforehand to see what made the most sense for the dog/handler. This is an important tip for those of you that are trainers out there - if you're teaching a skill that seems simple, but is ultimately new to you, practice on your dog at home first so you can get all the kinks worked out. 

(Side note: before there were so many training resources available online on task training, I taught everything to Jake first, to make sure I had a workable and replicable protocol before bringing it to clients.) 

Next Steps: Next I would want to work on getting the reorientation totally on a verbal cue without the need for a hand touch or the significant body cue that Eric shows in the video by leaning in the desired direction. I would do a few short sessions to achieve this goal.

End goal: I would generalize this to other situations and doorways. So making sure she could do it out of the crate, as well as public doorways, tight spaces, elevators etc.