Block/Cover Service Dog Task (Patreon)

Background

CoolWhip will be working with Eric. CoolWhip has a solid backup of a few steps, can pivot her hind end, and has a rear foot target. Eric will be working to combine these skills into the rear blocking behavior. Eric is not a dog trainer, but instead a somewhat willing participant with higher than average handling skills. This video was taken as part of my Atlas Certification series of videos and I will outline the training objective, next steps, as well as what I would do differently next time, below. 

Training Objective

The objective of this session is to get the dog to independently move into a rear blocking position using a rear foot target. I’m choosing to use a rear foot target because I haven’t taught this behavior before in this way and I thought it would create more precision and straightness and less reliant on hand cues, which is important when you, for instance, have groceries in your hands and are standing in line.

CoolWhip has a rear foot target behavior as well as a (rusty) back around me behavior ("beep beep") so we can use those skills to more easily get the behavior we’re looking for.

We will start by warming up the rear foot target. Next we will use a soft lure (empty hand gesture, no food in hand) to help guide into position, but want to fade and be able to get the positioning correct without the use of hand signals eventually. We will use the wall to help guide and maintain straightness at first with the goal to be able to move away from the wall. We will use the foot target to help maintain straightness to the handler without the wall as a guide.

Next Steps: Watching back this video, I think my next step, if this were a skill I was teaching for my own use, would actually be to make the foot target smaller and teach her to target my right leg with her right flank. Because this is beyond the scope of most people’s needs or skills, my next step for a client would be to generalize the behavior using the target to get it in lots of positions in locations before fazing out the target.

End goal: The end goal is for the dog to be able to move from heel position backwards into a rear blocking position on verbal cue and remain there until another cue is given.

Given Whip’s size, I wouldn’t have her do a down in this position, as she is likely not to be seen, but if it were a larger dog, I would also practice doing this behavior and adding a down.

What would I have done differently to be more successful?

There’s a few things I could have done to help my learner (husband) be more successful as well as help CoolWhip be more accurate to our end goal.

1) When I switched to a different target, I accidentally gave her too much space. This larger target made it harder for her to successfully land where we wanted her with precision.

2) I should have had Eric practice the hand signal without the dog first. When I noticed his lowered hand was affecting her movement, I should have stopped, put her in a down and practiced the mechanics of the hand/soft lure for the human before continuing on.

3) I had Eric use the word “free” because he didn’t want to use my heel-position word. However, I should have had him use a hand target instead of free because “free” for her means go be a dog. That’s confusing for her and could have been alleviated with a hand touch into the heeling position.