Nose Target (Adolescent Dog) *Free*
Adolescent and adult dogs can figure this out quickly too. We can help them by breaking the behaviour into really small steps for them.
Here is 10 month old Mini American Shepherd. Her handler has taught this to her already but this is my first training interaction with her. She is a sensitive girl but she still moves quickly through the steps with me. Changing handlers is a big issue and the relationship needs to be built from the start with each person. This simple game is a great way to start after feeding some treats and gentle petting.
Nose target 1 start
Here I am adding some distance between her nose and my hand. This adds movement.
I start with some side to side, which gives her different pictures of my hand. If I were to hold my hand parallel to the ground, that might be interpreted as a different signal or cue so I am careful (at this point) to make sure my hand is fingers pointing down.
When she is successful with that, we progress to me backing up to get her to follow the hand forward.
Nose target start 2 adding movement
Tip: The more repetitions of the behavior and the more slight variations (side to side, moving forward, more steps to get to the target, etc) that the dog does, the more history she has with doing the behavior. That will translate into more enthusiasm for doing the behavior. That allows us to keep asking for more from her (distance, duration, height, distraction etc). This applies to all behaviors we teach! When the dog is not successful, it pays to go back and do more reps at a level of difficulty that the dog was successful at doing, then try a single repetition of something that is a little bit harder mixed in with more easy ones.
Note: I use the same target hand throughout the beginning process to help him understand what I want.
With dogs that don’t like people in their personal space for whatever reason, we have to be patient and add other steps of counter conditioning the approach of a hand. More on counter conditioning in a later discussion.