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By Root 360 0

not have to go through the step of pairing hot reinforcers with stays because the hot reinforcer is right there—their handler! If you have a Beagle, on the other hand, and you put him in a stay and walk away, his first thought is, “Cool! I can go sniff things now, and she can’t stop me!” Remember, by pairing “stay” with the opportunity to go sniff, “stay” becomes a very exciting activity. If you are fair with your dog and give him an opportunity to access his favorite foods, toys and activities in exchange for holding a stay, he will be much less likely to break his stay and avail himself of all the goodies within his reach. Even a Pigs Fly dog has some semblance of working in cooperation with you—if he feels his interests are represented fairly in your training program, he will show some self-control and do it your way.

Take it on the road very gradually. Learning to stay in the face of incredible distraction is an important self-control lesson for dogs. Follow the rules of gradually introducing the stay in more and more stimulating locations. Be especially careful not to ask for a stay if your dog is so excited that there is no way he is going to succeed in staying.

Yield on your requirements when you change something. You are on your way to building one of the most important behaviors in your dog’s repertoire. A dog that can stay still for ten seconds in your living room probably understands the concept of stay. Expanding that concept to encompass staying in place for five minutes with you standing twenty feet away with distractions all around is a different task. The elements of a stay are:

Distance

Distraction

Duration

You will have to introduce each of these elements separately, and yield on the others until the new element is learned. Right now, your distance from your dog is approximately two feet, you are working in an area that has no distractions, and the duration that your dog can hold his stay is ten seconds.

Distance. We are going to add distance between you and your dog, so we will relax our requirements on duration and distraction.

1. Although you have worked your dog up to the point where he will hold his stay with distractions, you need to go back to the least distracting place you can think. Start again in your kitchen or the most boring place you can think of for your dog. We want to take away any distractions he might find in a more exciting place.

2. Ask your dog to “stay.”

3. Move one foot back and forth and click if your dog does not move. Don’t try for any duration of stay. You just want your dog to understand that stay means “stay in place, even if your handler is moving around.” Do that a few times until it looks like your dog understands that he has to stay in position while you move in order to earn his cookie.

4. Next, take one step away from your dog and step right back again. Click and feed him if he does not move. Work your way up to being able to take two steps away and return immediately. Click when you get back to your dog if he did not move.

5. Once you can take one step away from your dog and he did not move, you no longer should use the clicker to mark the behavior for the same reasons that were discussed in the section of shaping the stay. Now you can start working your way up to being able to walk however far from your dog you would like—I suggest twenty feet as a nice goal.

Distraction. Are you able to walk ten or twenty feet away from your dog while he stays in place? Bravo! A stay is a great achievement and you should have a big sense of accomplishment if you have gotten to this point. The next step towards a perfect stay is to add distractions in a controlled environment. It is important that you introduce distractions systematically because distractions are so much more… well, distracting for a Pigs Fly dog than for biddable dogs. Biddable dogs have it clear that they need to keep focused on their handlers, and the distractions are just interference with the task at hand. Pigs Fly dogs think that the distractions are the task at hand. Fortunately for us Pigs Fly