Mark Keating discusses a slightly outside of the box play technique for trainers preparing for biting sports. During suit work, there comes a time when your dog may have to bite a passive subject. This can be difficult for a dog who has never seen that picture. There are also times when the dog must fight through the decoy when he or she takes all motion out of the work. In this short video, Mark will explain how he conditions his young puppy to work through this on a tug, rather than wait until the dog is full grown and working on a suit.

I'm experiencing some equipment bias with my dog. The tug video mentions this, but could you further explain what I should do to fix this?

Basically, you need to spend time working on the items your dog isn’t as fond of to have all your fun. I’d put away the equipment the dog is biased towards and work on the same exercises with the other items. You may need to lower your criteria when playing with an item the dog doesn’t like as much. I want my dogs to play with me anywhere, anytime, with anything. This is accomplished by making the interaction about the play as opposed to about the actual item. The activity and interaction with me should be more important to the dog than the actual item.

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