Rainy Day Games

If you and your dog have cabin fever, here are some suggestions to take the edge off.

1) Work on your sit or wait at the door. Have your dog look at you before crossing the threshold. Invite friends over to help proof your sit at the door. If you want more help on this attend our Calm Departures & Arrivals class.

2) Teach your dog to offer their front paws so you can wipe them off when they are muddy. Tickle the back of your dog's lower leg until they lift it off the ground, as they lift it up, say "yes!" and reward with a cookie. Repeat five or more times, then put a small towel over your hand and repeat the exercise five or more times. Then start to rub their paws after they offer them to you and reward as you rub them. Take it slowly and reward each step generously. 

3) Teach tug with rules. Play tug, give, sit, tug, give, sit, etc. for exercise, impulse control and to teach the immediate release of a high value object. For more information attend our Tug, Fetch & Release class. 

4) Play fetch or catch with a sit before each throw to improve impulse control. Make sure your dog is not skidding on slippery floors to play fetch. Slipping may cause muscle strain or injury. For more information attend our Tug, Fetch & Release class.

5) Have a treasure hunt, hide treats or toys around the house or go outdoors between rain showers and have your dog find them.  This helps to mentally tire them and teaches them to use their sense of smell. Our Nose Work classes are so much fun and a great way to capitalize on your dog's amazing nose.

6) Play hide and seek. When your dog is in the other room hide behind the sofa, a door, in the shower or behind the bed. Say "Find me!" and wait for them to come and find you. The fewer clues you give the more challenging for the dog. Start with lots of clues like making a noise then fade the clues out so the dog has the responsibility to find you. We teach Recall Games classes that use hide and seek to motivate your dog to look for you. 

7) Give your dog a nice chewy to work on while you are gone or busy. Chewing should be supervised and small bits should be taken away from the dog. If your dog is resource guarding their chewies, do not give them a high value item to practice guarding. Call us for private lessons to end poor behavior.

8) Give your dog a Kong or another intelligent challenge toy with dog food in it. The Nina Ottosson dog puzzles are a wonderful way to spend quality time with your dog.

9) Do Doga (doggy yoga) with your dog. Downward Facing Dog, Cobra,  Breathing Awareness and Upward Paw Pose. Be gentle, overstretching can cause soreness and injury.

10) Work on your sit stay add duration first, when that is reliable at least 80% of the time add distance and last add distractions like household members talking, tv going, doorbells ringing. Try not to get greedy and do too much all at once, remember to set your dog up for success. Always go back to your dog to reward them for the stay instead of calling them to you. Only call them to you when you have worked on stay for several repetitions prior. Attend a Family Dog 1 Stay, Wait & Settle class for more detail on how to train a stay.

11) Play Crate Games (visit  www.livingwithdogs.us/books/ for a marvelous the “Crate Games” by Susan Garrett). Crate Games or Mat Games are a great way to teach a sit or down stay, a motivated release, impulse control and how to love your crate or mat. 

12) Teach your dog a fun or a useful new trick. Tricks are a great way to bond and spend quality time together. People usually laugh and have fun when they are training tricks. The dogs have fun when you have fun. Train your dog to shake, sit up, spin in a circle, roll over, play dead, or to pick up their toys. You can train them to know each toy by name and put them in a basket or toy box.

13) Play the Muffin Tin Game. Click here for a video to see how to play.

14) Play 101 Things to Do with a Box a game invented by Karen Pryor who started out as a dolphin trainer and now is world famous for her books.

15) Play Push the Box (with a toy in it). Click here to view a video. 

16) Put your rain gear on and take your dog for a nice long walk. Take a look at this fancy dogbrella available from Hammacher Schlemmer for a hoot. Our Loose Leash Walking class will help you work with your dog to have more fun on walks. 

Dogs are individuals. Every dog has different needs and rewards. Know what your dog likes and use those things or activities to motivate and reward him or her for good behavior. Be safe and have fun.

We hope you will use the ideas that are best suited for your dog. For more information about training your dog to do more visit our website for a variety of classes and dog sports.

Proactive & Progressive Training

I am a proactive trainer. I teach my students to try to be proactive and patient too. The other day a student who had a new rescue, Sadie, came to me for help. Sadie is a very energetic and a persistent jumper when greeting new people.

I explained to the client that by jerking the leash and correcting the dog verbally with "Eh-Eh!" or "No!", that the client's attention to her dog may be actually increasing the jumping behavior and actually hurting her relationship with the dog. She had a hard time understanding how force free training would work, but she was willing to give it a try because the corrective approach wasn't working for her at all.

We started by ignoring Sadie's jumping for a bit. I walked up to her and when she jumped, I did not move, look at her, talk to her or interact with her. I was using the lack of social interaction to extinguish the behavior. Finally, after waiting 30 seconds, she sat by herself. marked her behavior with the word "Yes" and rewarded her richly, We poured on the praise, scratched her generously behind her ears and rewarded with tidbits of food her for sitting.


I wanted to use some preventative management so she could not practice jumping on me while we trained, so I stepped on her leash so that it did not restrict her but stopped her jumping up. Meanwhile, before she could start jumping, I asked for a sit and rewarded her lavishly again this time for by dropping her food rewards on the ground. A high rate of reward is very important in the beginning when a dog is replacing old behaviors with new ones. We continued with a very high rate of reward for about 2 minutes and then we gave her a break so she had time to soak that lesson in. Breaks are important too. We continued practicing with three lessons asking for a "four feet on the floor" sit and tapered off on the food rewards very slowly, while praising and patting and playing with her. By the end of about 5 minutes she was no longer jumping on me.

Sadie will go home and practice greetings for the week. We may have to warm her up again next week, and continue the lesson until she is no longer jumping, even if that means a year of training.

When a dog practices a behavior for a long time, it becomes ingrained in their brain, in a neural pathway. We want that old neural pathway to become weak through lack of practice and lack of rewarding consequences. We want to create a new neural pathway that gets stronger with each day's practice. This requires patience and persistence on the owners part. She is very motivated to stop the jumping, because Sadie could jump on her elderly mother and knock her down.

We could go a bit further with the training in the time she has and make sure that Sadie had lots of experience greeting many different people, men, women and children and proof her for different environments and set ups, like the front door with the door bell or knocking noise.

My mother always told me "Inch by inch, life's a cinch. Yard by yard, life is hard." and that holds true in dog training too. Sadie is a fun and smart dog and I expect her to learn relatively quickly with a progressive approach and lots of practice. Her owner is delighted with Sadie's progress and is now interested in Agility, which would be a really nice way to use some of Sadie's boundless energy!

Photos by Pierre Tardiff (c) 
The top photo is another Agility student, Gypsy and the bottom photo is our lovely Aptos training field.