"Go Home" (Patreon)

What is "Go Home"? 

Go home is a behavior that means the dog will take the handler on lead or by harness handle (preferred) to a pre-determined "home" base like a welcome mat or stairs from a known route or location in their local area (like from the bottom of the driveway, or down the street on a routine walk). This task can be triggered by a verbal cue "go home" or an environmental cue such as the handler wandering past a particular designation in the yard. 

Why Train "Go Home" as a task? 

This task can be used for a few different reasons. First, for a type of boundary, as in a child with autism wanders into the front yard, the dog brings them "home" to the backyard or back door. It can also be used for cognitive disorders like Alzheimers or those experiencing brain fog to be able to lead the person back to their home. 

Note: while this video talks specifically about "go home" these same principles can be used and generalized to teaching a dog to "find a seat" or "find outside" when in a building. Remember that some dogs will need to physically be able to see their ending location to accurately perform this task! 

Training objective for this session:

In this video we are introducing this behavior. We are working towards CoolWhip being able to find home (and eventually lead handler home) on cue from a short distance away (about 10 ft). We will break this behavior down using known behaviors like “go to place” and “paws up” and quickly introduce the “go home” cue. Once she’s consistently going to the welcome mat at the door, we will start varying the distance she needs to go to get to the mat. We will also add in the person going to the mat with her.

Reinforcement Used: 

Medium value trail mix of freeze dried raw, kibble, and Happy Howies

Background Info:

In this video my husband is working my dog CoolWhip. He is a pet person with above average skills but does not use a clicker so we use “yes” to mark behavior. CoolWhip knows a “go to place” as go to place and lay down, so I decided to use a paw target with the mat to show her that we’re looking for standing on the mat and not necessarily downing.

What I do would do differently after reviewing footage: 

There were a few things I noticed that would make the team more successful:

- When I asked Eric to stare at the mat he included a large body signal leading to the mat. It would have been good to mention that we would need to fade the body signal, and eventually the eye contact with the mat as those are both huge cues to the dog of what to do next.

- Later in the video I say “each rep we’re going to get further” and then directly contradict that by asking him to vary the distance he goes away from the home target, while the average distance she travels gets further. I should have been more clear that our goal is get further away over time, but the method of getting there includes doing easier and harder reps and varying the distance from the mat on each rep while the overall distance increases over the session. 

Next Steps: Next session we would work on increasing the distance she can be away from the mat while still being able to accurately bring the human home.

End goal: Our neighborhood is not set up to safely do this task from more than a house or two away (busier road, no sidewalks), so for this dog we would need to limit it to that. The end goal for a different dog with a better neighborhood for walking could be to find home from any location on their typical traveling/working route. Alternatively, it could be to lead someone back to the house if they go past, say the car at the bottom of the driveway.

Additional Notes:

If this were a dog that were to be using a handle for this task (which, as a guide dog person, I am definitely biased towards using whenever any type of leading or pulling task is involved, as to preserve the collar for loose leash walking only, and not put undue pressure on the dog's neck), I would have introduced pulling into harness separately, and then introduced it in the next training session by starting from just one foot away from the mat and then backchaining to the "go home" mat with handle up.