Movement Away From Petting with Tyler Muto

Movement away from your dog is going to be more challenging than movement around them. To help facilitate the process and make it easier for both you and your dog, it is important to use proper handling and stay connected to the leash so that if your dog makes mistake you can have good timing and avoid over-correction. Practice this until you can take a big quick step away from the dog and they stay on place without needing to be reminded.

Once your dog is doing well with movement around and away from them, the next challenge that we are going to work with is petting. For some dogs, this is not a challenge at all as they're able to remain calm while being pet. For others, such as Maybe, this is going to be a big challenge as petting elicits a very excited response and makes it difficult for them to sit still.

It is important that we can pet our dogs while they remain on the place because as we build longer and a longer duration, you will want to be able to return your dogs and praise them to let them know they're doing well, even though we may need them to continue to stay there for longer. If we cannot praise our dogs while they are staying on place, then during the longer duration repetitions we will not be able to give them any feedback and they will be on their own throughout that time.

This video was taken directly out of our online course, Leash Reactivity with Tyler Muto.