Bringing Treats on Walks, featuring Chance

Meet Chance!

Chance is an alert 2 year old cattle dog mix who just loves his owners, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to take control during walks. Chance gets a lot of his exercise off-leash at a local park but tends to not pay attention and disappears when he gets the chance! We needed to teach him that it pays to stay close to his owners off-leash, that's why Chance’s owners must bring treats on walks.

Bringing a variety of different value treats on walks will teach Chance that it literally pays to listen! Practicing calling his name and surprising him with an extremely high value treat when he comes will teach him to be on high alert when someone calls his name.

There are a few tricks to remember. Most importantly, you have to actually remember to bring the treats with you! It's also great if you bring 2-3 different kinds of treats in your treat bag so you can reward better actions with higher value treats. This way you can keep it interesting and save the higher-value treats for rewarding really good behaviors.

Food is the dog equivalent of money to humans. Would you go to work if you were not going to get paid?! If you won the lottery and had a huge weekly paycheck would you even work at all? Teaching your dog that good things happen when he listens to you will help him understand that it pays to listen! 

For more information on Treats on Walks and Treat Bags, visit Zen Dog Training Online.

Otis the Goldendoodle.

Meet Otis!

Recently, this ruggedly-handsome fellow suddenly started acting up. See, his outdoorsy family used to love take Otis hiking and on long, rambling off-leash walks... until he started dashing off after every bird, squirrel and stick that caught his eye. His mom would call call call his name, but to no avail. So she called us!

Gordon and I learned that this Goldendoodle had just celebrated his eighth-month-birthday, which in dog years is the equivalent of turning twelve. Now I don't know about you, but some of the twelve-year-olds I've met have a tendency to be — well, kinda bratty. I'm not trying to be mean, but I remember what I was like as a pre-teen: a little obnoxious, a little angsty, and trying my hardest to stake claim to my independence... which is a nice way of saying I started questioning my parents' rules. (Sorry, Mom and Dad. I know you were only looking out for me.)

Otis is going through the same thing, and ignoring his family's calls is his way of trying to be his own man — or dog, if you want to nitpick. Unfortunately, Otis has to learn what I did back in the day: sometimes our parents know better.

To make learning this lesson fun, we got back to basics with Otis and taught him that coming when called is a good thing. We do this with an activity we at Zen Dog call Name Game; we were able to show him that responding to his name is awesome.

For a shaggy adventurer like Otis to get the hang of recall, his family is going to have to play Name Game several times a day. Hopefully our friend here will master this technique soon; summer's already winding down, and I know he's eager to get out there and enjoy the sunshine. I'm going to do just that right now — with sunscreen, of course.

To learn more about Name Game, visit Zen Dog Training Online.