Training games and why we use them…
Within our dog training plans we use a lot of training games. Training games are a great tool to utilise in our dog every day life, they are simple and small but can teach our dogs some very useful and essential skills. They are definitely not to be underestimated!
I find that often dog owners can become overwhelmed with the idea of training their dog. Life is super busy and the last thing you need is a training plan with 100’s of hard to read pages and lots of different instructions, that’s why I like to use training games.
Simple step by steps, easy to learn and remember for both you and your dogs. You can concentrate on one or two games at a time instead of doing too much at once and burning out.
But if the games are simple and easy, how much of an impact can they really have?
I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll mention it again. The most effective training starts off easy to make it as successful as possible. Simple training games can be built upon to create bigger and better skills or they can be utilised in lots of different ways.
Let’s take “Touch” as an example. Touch is a simple game where we teach our dogs to come in and boop our hand with their nose.
Seems simple, right? So let’s look at how many ways we can utilise a Touch once it’s been well trained:
-A touch is a great way to move your dog from one place to another without dragging them around on a lead. Maybe our dogs are hyper focused on something in the environment and we need to move on, we ask them for a touch, it brings them away from whatever they were looking at and we carry on moving. Maybe they are up on the couch when they shouldn’t be, instead of picking them up, we simply ask them for a touch so they jump down.
-It can be utilised in loose lead walking. If our dogs get to the end of the lead when in “loose lead walking mode” we can ask for a touch next to our leg and bring them back to where they are supposed to be.
-Perhaps our dogs are doing something at home we would rather them not. Like surfing the countertops, we’ve just sat down and don’t want to get up, we shout “touch” they come flying in and we redirect them away from trying to steal our food on the side. Replacing the undesirable behaviour to something we like instead.
-Touch is a great recall. If you make it fun enough and build up that distance, we can use it as an alternative recall cue.
-We can use it for examination purposes, if we build up the time so they pop their nose on our hand for longer periods we can get them holding the touch position while they have a quick health check.
-It can be used by your groomer to move them around the grooming table to reduce handling. It’s especially great for dogs who may not be fond of being handled or touched.
These are just the examples I could think of in the moment but from that one simple and easy training game we’ve got unlimited uses which can be personalised to each dog and case. Each time I teach this in a session, i have clients coming up with new ways in which they can use it- I even had a puppy recall back to it when they had escaped out of the front door!
And don’t worry you don’t even have to memorise the training game steps. They are all written down for you on your Google drive folder that all clients will get access to.
Overall our training games are an effective tool to build new skills and desirable behaviours in our dogs. They make training fun for them and us and also doesn’t require too much energy and time… because let’s face it, none of us have much of that spare.
Casey- Weird & Wonderful, Dog Training and Behaviour 💚