16 AprEpisode 143 | Teaching your dog to stand (Day 17 of the Dog Training in 21 Days Challenge)
We've been running a challenge on Instagram this month based on our Dog Training in 21 Days course! Day 17 is teaching stand. This is an often-overlooked behavior that is a great thing to teach both because it'll hone your training chops and also because it'll keep your dog from just guessing that after you ask for a sit you usually want a down, and vice versa. Sometimes... you're going to want a different stationary behavior! You might also want a dog to stand during grooming, or if you're ever doing any kind of commercial work or modeling with a dog, or if you're in the dog show world.
Jump in and join the challenge on Instagram! Tag @schoolforthedogs!
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Transcript:
Annie:
So this guy goes to a dog trainer with a dog who he says has separation anxiety. And he says, the weird thing is when we leave, when he cries, it sounds like Toyota. And the trainer says, you know, that's actually not that unusual. Tell me when you come home and he farts, what does that sound like? And the dog owner is like, actually, when we come home and he farts and it sounds like Ppppprius. And the trainer says, well that is strange. Usually absence makes the fart go Honda.
[Intro and music]
Annie:
Frequent listeners will know that we are in the middle of running our Dog Training in 21 days challenge on Instagram. It is based on our on demand Dog Training in 21 Days course, which you can get for free, the whole thing, either by following along on Instagram, through April 21st. Or you can just get the whole course at once at schoolforthedogs.com/DT21days, use code DT21 days at checkout. And you can get it for free, between now and the end of the month.
And tomorrow's challenge is teaching a stand. And teaching stand is one of my favorite behaviors to teach for a few reasons. For one thing, dogs stand all the time.. Pretty much as often as they're sitting or lying down, those are usually the three big stable, non-movement based behaviors dogs engage in. And while it's very common to teach sit and down, stand often gets left out, but it's useful for so many reasons.
Sometimes you need a dog to be standing for whatever reason. Especially, you know, I've done a fair bit of commercial work, and that's certainly a time when you might want a dog who not only knows how to stand, but can stand on a mark, can stand for a duration, whatever length of time you want the dog to stand for. Like stand, stay.
Certainly in the world of show dogs, quite important to have a dog who knows to stand and stay. Although in my experience, this is not usually a behavior that's given any kind of specific verbal or visual cue by the human, but it certainly could be.
But you know, one reason why I really liked to teach stand is because I think often dogs are guessing that you either want them to sit or you want them to lie down when they catch onto the idea that it's training time. And that's not ideal. We don't want our dogs guessing, we want our dogs actually understanding what it is we want.
So if you work in a stand and sort of rotate that in what you're asking for, they are going to be more likely to pay attention because there's always this other option. It's not just, if I'm sitting, they probably want me to lie down and if I'm lying down, maybe the next thing they want is for me to sit. There's always this other possibility.
So what I'm going to describe, is working a stand into a training session where you're also working on Sit. Also a really nice sort of example of how to teach in pairs or even teach in trios here. I'm gonna also talk about how to go from down to stand. And then from there, I'm just going to sort of give a brief outline of how you can work all these three things at once. I think, once I described the first two things, you are going to figure it out from there.
So start off with some treats. If you're using a clicker, I always suggest putting the clicker and your treats in the same hand, your non-dominant hand. Have some treats ready to go in a treat pouch. You definitely want to have one hand, at least one hand, completely empty and free. As you start out, I am going to suggest how you might sometimes use a little bit of a lure, but as you're starting this, I suggest having your treats in your pouch or in your non-dominant hand with the clicker. You can also use a word like yes, instead of the clicker.
To start off, you're just going to cue your dog into a sit. You can use a verbal cue here. You can use a visual. I'm probably ultimately going to suggest using a visual for practicing all three of these behaviors, but start out using whatever you want. The moment your dog sits, you are going to click or say your word, Yes.
And then what I want you to do is give the treat far enough out in front of your dog so that your dog is going to have to stand up to get it. As soon as your dog finishes eating that treat, you are going to cue your dog to sit again. And then again, after you click or use your Yes Word, you are going to reward just for enough so your dog has to get up.
What I am doing here is just building this physical memory, this little repetition game of sitting, standing, sitting, standing. So the faster that you can do this, the better. I want you to get like a nice little rhythm down, make sure you're in a non-distracting environment. Make sure you're not presenting those treats. The treat should not be visible until after you use your clicker or marker word.
Now there's no magic number of how many times you need to do this. You could try jumping to the next step, which I'm going to describe, right away. You could just do this session for now and then try the next step tomorrow. Up to you.
But if you feel like you have kind of a nice little rhythm going with this, the next thing I'm going to want you to do is wait for your dog to sit. You are going to click or say yes, when your dog sits. Now you are actually going to give your dog a treat while your dog is in the Sit. If you've been practicing them getting up, you want to make sure to get in quick to them in that sit before they get up, because they've been conditioned to get up.
The next thing you're going to do is ask for a stand. Now you can either just say, stand, and wait for them to do it. Like I said, if you build up a nice bit of repetition, they might do this. You could say stand and then drop the treat on the ground. Make sure you're clicking after they stand, but before they get the treat. So you're going to want to drop it again far enough so that they're getting up to go get the treat, requiring them to stand. Or you can use like a hand touch, put your hand out in front of their nose, far enough that the dog was going to have to get up, off their haunches to touch your hand and then click and treat that.
Sometimes I'll work in my ultimate visual cue as I'm doing this. I like to use, for stand, because you can kind of build it in this way. I like to use a stand of my hand, out to my side, kind of, I guess parallel to the ground, perpendicular to the rest of my body. Kind of like you're making a left-hand turn sign with your hand, although I usually use my right hand, but it's my right hand and arm, but it's basically that position.
And by kind of having my hand out there in that position, in the touch position, this can become ultimately the cue for stand, this hand position. If you need to, you can stick a couple of treats, in between your fingers very subtly. I suggest only doing this a few times, cause you don't want to get stuck having to have treats in front of your dog's nose in order to get this behavior. But that can be one way to kind of jump start your dog.
So again, you are waiting for your dog to sit. You're going to go in there quickly now and reward your dog in the sit position. And then you're going to give your stand cue, either verbal or the hand signal, wait for your dog to stand and then reward in the stand position. Does that make sense?
You can then wait for your dog to sit, or you can cue the sit and reward in the sit position. So you're starting out by rewarding, like in the opposite position of what you're actually asking for. And then you're gonna end up rewarding in the position that you're asking for. As long as you're using your clicker or your marker word to pinpoint the moment that the behavior is happening, it is okay to give the treat while your dog is engaging in a new behavior, is in a different position. And sometimes it can actually be really useful when you're training to give the treat in such a way in such a place that you are resetting the dog.
Now, the way I'm describing this is teaching the dog sit and stand in tandem, is kind of, you know, teaching in pairs, which could be really fun. You could just work on the stand and if you're going to do that, I would start by cuing your dog in a sit, reward in the sit the first time. Now ask for a stand, however it is you're doing it. Either with a word or with your hand signal.
Or like I said, you could start out in the beginning by dropping the treats so your dog just has to get up for it. Although ultimately we're going to want to move away from that method. Wait for your dog to stand. When your dog stands, now, you're going to click for the stand. And, you know, you want to be quick. You really want to be watching those back legs so you get that moment that they're standing before they start walking away.
But you could just start working on the stand rather than the sit and the stand, by now rewarding your dog in the sit position. So click for the stand and then give the dog a treat in such a way that their butt is going to probably hit the ground in order to get it. This is probably, means like, you're going to give it a little bit above the dog's head. If you're working with a dog and a crate, you can certainly up the chances that you're going to get a sit cause they don't have a lot of other positions to go into. But that's just another way to work this behavior.
Now, of course you can also do all the same things I just described, but with a down. So you would start out cuing the down and then rewarding your dog, in front of them a little bit so they have to get up from the down into a stand so that the dog can get the treat. Then cue the down again, click the down reward in such a way that the dog has to get up to get the treat. You could work in sits in this way as well, still practicing the stand for the dog to get up to get the treat. If you feel like you can start to get tricky in that way.
Then you will move towards the step of clicking for the down rewarding in the down position. Again, you're going to need to be quick here because you want to reward before your dog gets up. And then you're going to ask for a stand. Either you can start adding in the word, and waiting for the stand if you think it's going to happen, or if you feel like you need to prompt it a little bit in the beginning, you can toss a treat on the ground or use that hand signal. If you need to put some treats in your fingers, you can.
Wait for the dog to stand, click that stance and then can deliver the treat either in the stand or deliver it in such a way that you're helping them get back into a down, or helping them into a sit. And of course you can then start ping-ponging between these, these sit and stand behaviors and down and stand behaviors to the point where your dog is not going to know what's going to come next, unless you offer the cue.
I like to stick to either using all verbal cues when I'm doing this or using all hand cues. If you hand have a hand cue for sit and down. My hand cue for down, which we actually go over in dog training and 21 days, is often putting my hand up kind of in like swearing an oath position.
You can use this to fade a lure if you're used to luring your dog down. I explain how to do that in the dog training in 21 days course. And first it, I usually like a snap, which is both a visual and an audio cue, which I also go over how to teach, with sort of like a little bit of a faded lure in the course. And then, like I said, down, a hand out to the side.
I think this is a good exercise to hone your training because it's gonna involve some speed. You want your dog going from one position here to the next position here quickly, especially if you're working on sort of keeping them in one position. But also if you're working on resetting them into the next position with so many things, like with so many things with training, reps mean a lot. The more reps you can get in a given one, two, three minute training session, the more your dog is learning, the faster your dog is learning.
Remember dogs are learning all the time. So in the 60 seconds that you might've set aside to practice one single behavior — and by the way, usually better to have shorter training sessions and longer ones — in that little slice of time, your dog is not just learning during the moments that you've clicked for the sit or clicked for the stand. Your dog is learning and all those other moments too.
And the richer you can make the experience, the more repetitions you can get in that minute, the more of those seconds, your dog is spending learning the thing that you're wanting your dog to learn. And the less time your dog is spending learning or trying to learn about what's going on in the other room, or what your socks smell like, et cetera, et cetera.
When I did chicken training a few years ago, which I spoke about on a podcast recently, it was a really, really incredible experience. Five days of packed training of chickens with Parveen Forhoody, who started her chicken training camp with Bob Bailey, who I've been talking about a lot lately.
She referred to this as mass, which I'd never heard before. And I really liked, I liked that word. I liked the image that it gave me. It's like, you want a behavior to build mass. The more repetitions you have of that behavior, the bigger the mass is. And the stronger that behavior is going to get.
What's interesting is, I think this is something I've actually heard economists talk about too. How, we humans, we're better at doing things that we do a lot than we are at doing things that we don't do that many times.
An example I heard from an economist once, I can't remember where, but I think it was like, people tend to make better decisions buying groceries than they do when buying houses, because there's just a lot more mass, as Parveen would say, given to the behavior, buying groceries at something most of us do many, many, many, many, many times in a given year, whereas buying a house is something that you might only do a few times, in your lifetime, if at all.
And so while you would think people would be smarter about spending money in these big quantities on these big purchases, because it's more money and it's more important. In reality, we're actually smarter about spending smaller amounts of money because we have a lot more experience doing that.
Anyway, I hope that you will join the challenge this weekend. If you do, and you're on Instagram, make sure to tag us @schoolforthedogs. I think you will have a lot of fun teaching this stand behavior, and it'll make future reps of teaching sit and down a lot more fun because you'll be working in this third behavior. You'll be building your ability to train speedily. And certainly, like I said, there are definitely applications for this in the real world, when you really might want your dog to have a good stand.
So once you teach them this behavior and have it on cue, you can start working on having them do a stand-stay. You can start working on having them stand on a mark. You can start working on making your cues subtle, or making it so that you can give the cue at a distance, et cetera, et cetera. But this is the very first step, and I wish you lots of luck.
