Recall – Come When Called

Puppies are great at coming when called.  I have yet to meet a young pup who doesn’t bound along joyously to its owner when called either for a treat, a game or a love.  Why then do so many dogs become hard of hearing as they reach puberty.  The recall and pulling on the leash are two of the most problematic behaviours for pet owners.

Training of the recall starts when our pups are very young.  Steven Lindsay has this to say about early training of the following and recall behaviour in young puppies:

“An area of interest for average dog owners regards active following and coming when called.  Long walks consisting of occasional surprise manoeuvres, exciting changes of pace, unexpected chase and counter-chase episodes, hide-and-seek games, punctuated with occasional opportunities for ball play or stick fetching – all facilitate the learning of appropriate “staying close” skills in puppies. 

Even if you have been careful to do all these things with your puppy, there are certain things that you may inadvertently have done to make your pup’s recall weak or even non-existent.

• Have you ever called your pup to do something your pup doesn’t particularly like such as a bath, nail trim or medication, amongst others?
• Have you called your pup from playing with other pups or dogs in the park and put him in the car to go home, or put him on a leash?
• Have you ever spotted your dog doing something like digging up a precious plant and called him to you to give him a scolding?
• If your pup ignores you do you simply carry on calling him over and over with no response eventually ending up yelling?
• Do you call your dog and when he comes to you ignore him and continue chatting to your friend?

If we are guilty of any of these things we are, in effect, punishing our dog for coming when called.  Punishment does not have to be physically aversive.  Anything that is done to your dog that he doesn’t like such as bathing, going home when he’s having fun, a scolding, ignoring him are all punishment.  Punishment decreases the likelihood that the behaviour that is being punished will be repeated.  So, is it any wonder that now the recall “Fido, come!” predicts something unpleasant happening.

There are many things that we can do to maintain the wonderful recall that we had when our pups were little.  Bear in mind that before 12 or 14 weeks, you were the most interesting thing in your pup’s life.  But then puppy started realising that there were other even more interesting things in his environment such as interesting smells, other dogs, friendly people – the list is endless.

So, how do we make our recall behaviour strong?

• We continue our obedience training no matter where we are so that the pup learns to work through all the distractions around him and focus on you.  And practise “Come” wherever you are, rewarding your pup by letting him go back and do whatever it is he was doing before you called.  (The Premack Principle).
• Teach him to spin towards you whenever he hears you call his name and to respond to the “Come” command so that both these things predict something great is about to happen.
• Make yourself the most interesting thing in your pup’s life.  Vary the rewards for the pup coming to you by feeding him extra special treats, play a game with him such as fetch or chase or tug, or hide and seek, or simply give him an extra special love or tummy rub.

One of the things to avoid is that when the pup is ignoring you and continuing to sniff or dig or play, is to offer a bribe.  Very often offering a bribe causes a resistant or distracted dog to come.  However, the bribe also directly reinforces the refusal behaviour and with repeated bribery, the refusal behaviour may actually become stronger than the dog’s interest in obtaining the offered food bribe.  This of course results in the owner producing an even more enticing bribe the better to gain the dog’s compliance, resulting in even stronger refusal behaviour.  This is known as the “bribe trap”.  Very often the only way to get out of this trap is to start training the recall from scratch, using completely different cues and rewards.

Your Demeanour and Body Language Affect your Dog’s Performance

We all know that probably the major difference between dogs and humans is the ability of humans to communicate instructions and abstract thoughts and ideas verbally.  Because we are so good at doing this, we tend to rely less on the ability to read body language.  Dogs, who do not have a sophisticated verbal form of communication tend to be past masters at reading body language and even the most subtle expressions or smallest movements carry whole paragraphs of information.

So, why is it that the more the dog acts confused at instruction do we become louder and more verbose?  Our body language becomes more aggressive and our tone becomes more strident.  What messages are we sending our dogs who are behaving at this point as though they had never had any training whatsoever.  They are confused and many times this confusion is read as “stubborn” or “disobedient” which causes the human to escalate his or her unreasonable behaviour even more.  A vicious cycle where nobody wins.

Once we have come to terms with the fact that our behaviour has a direct effect on our dogs’ behaviour, everything changes.  Because we are being more careful with our tone of voice and the consistency of both our body language and our verbal cues, our dogs are more relaxed in the knowledge that their handler actually knows what he or she is doing!  Make sure that your demeanour and attitude is conducive to good communication between you and your dog.

Very often as I approach the line at the start of a Field Trial I am extremely nervous.  I know that my dog is picking up on all the subtle signals I am sending her, so I have taught myself to stand tall, walk slowly, breathe deeply and concentrate on being as positive as I can be so that my dog gets all the right messages and is in a place where she can also give her best.

Generalization

Probably one of the most common phrases I hear in class is “My dog does this exercise (sit, down, walk on a loose leash) perfectly at home.  Why is he not doing it the same way in class (or at the park, or on the beach, or at my friend’s house)”?

This little spaniel obviously has no problem sitting wherever he is told to.

 

What has happened in this case is that all the learning that the dog has done has been associated specifically with the environment in which the learning took place.  The dog has been taught to sit in a particular part of your home, in front of you, with you holding the treats in your hand.  When he hears the word “Sit”, this is the picture he has in his mind.  This is the picture that he associates with the word “Sit”.  So when you go for a walk in your neighbourhood and you ask him to sit next to you three of four houses down the road, he looks at you as though he’d never heard the word “Sit” before in his life.  You have drastically changed the picture he has in his mind of the behaviour of sitting.  Invariably and unfortunately, this confused dog is labelled either stubborn or hard-headed.

It is important to understand that dogs do not generalize behaviour well.  As humans we do this very well.  To us transferring learnt behaviour to different environments is very easy and we do it all the time.  So that even though we may have learnt to write our names on lined paper with a pencil, we are able to repeat that learnt behaviour in countless variations without even thinking about it.  We have generalized the behaviour of writing our name.

To help our dog with generalizing behaviours we have to take his learnt behaviours “on the road”.  After we have taught him the basic behaviour in a familiar place then we need to teach him that he can do that behaviour anywhere and the best way to do this is to practise his learnt behaviour wherever and whenever we can.  We may have to lower our criteria for that particular behaviour and we may also have to increase our rate of reinforcement to get that behaviour in the dog park, or at the shopping mall, but this way the dog will learn to generalize very quickly with a little help and patience from you.  The good news is that generalization is habitual. Once your dog has generalized a few behaviours, he will begin to generalize others very, very quickly.

Preparing Your Canine Athlete For Competition

Whether you compete with your dog in field trials, agility, flyball or any other of the active dog sports you will need to start thinking of starting a conditioning programme after the long summer layoff with less exercise than he or she normally gets.

Your Agility and Flyball dog will need to build the muscles needed to cope with jumping and quick changes of direction, whereas your pointer will need to start working on those muscles that require longer distance running over a variety of terrain.

Bear in mind that running up hill uses different sets of muscles than running down hill.  Retrievers will need to work on shorter sprints but will also need to be supple enough to crawl through low fences and climb up steep embankments and jump across narrow gullies.  A retriever will also be required, often, to swim long distances.

When planning your conditioning programme start slow and build up to your optimum fitness goals.  Plan it so that your dog is peaking at the very first trial of the season.

Cranial Cruciate Ligament Injuries

Owners of sporting dogs know that a diagnosis of an injury to the knee is not good news. The most common stifle (knee) injury is to the cranial cruciate ligament, or the CCL.

There is no reliable way to prevent stifle damage in active dogs. The stifle (knee) joint in dogs is extremely vulnerable to injury because it has no interlocking bones to provide support or stability. A dog’s stifle joint depends upon ligaments for stability. The cranial cruciate ligament provides most of this support and, when torn or ruptured, causes the most common hindlimb lameness in companion and sporting dogs.

However, in humans, new research is investigating ways to prevent ACL injuries in an effort to avoid lost time from sports and competition.  The stability of the knee is dependent on different factors. The two most important are the static and the dynamic stabilizers of the knee.

• Static Stabilizers
  The static stabilizers are the four major ligaments of the knee: the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL), the medial collateral ligament (MCL), and the lateral collateral ligament (LCL).
• Dynamic Stabilizers
  The dynamic stabilizers of the knee are the muscles and tendons that surround the joint. These muscles and tendons are controlled by what’s known as neuromuscular input, the unconscious activation of these structures to control the position of the joint.

Neuromuscular training is used to teach the body better habits for knee stability. By training how your knee moves, especially when jumping, landing, and pivoting, you can maintain a more stable position of the knee joint. Several studies have shown that neuromuscular training programs can reduce the chance of an ACL injury.  One of the programmes was developed by the the Santa Monica Sports Medicine Research Foundation and can be downloaded from http://smsmf.org/files/PEP_Program_04122011.pdf.

I believe if one could develop a similar training programme for dogs it would minimize the risk of CCL injury, particularly in those sports that involve rapid changes in direction at speed, often combined with a jump.

Warm up and Cool Down

Any time you exercise your dog it is very important to warm him up and afterwards cool him down.  Don’t take your dog out of his crate or the back of your vehicle and walk to the start line without the warm up.  Get the blood flowing with a short walk or jog.  The warm-up stimulates the delivery of increased oxygen and nutrients to the muscles.  Also do some simple stretches to limber up the tendons and ligaments.  Teach your dog to do a play bow; have him sitting in front of you and get him to stretch sideways to get an offered treat first to the left and then to the right.

After you have finished your run, don’t just pop him back in his crate or the back of your car.  Cool him down first with a slow 5 minute walk with a couple of “sips” of water out of a bottle.  Check him over for any soreness in his joints and then let him rest.

The Eight out of Ten Rule

The whole point of so-called “obedience” training is to have some control of your dog’s behaviour at all times and in spite of distractions, without having to physically handle him.  This can only happen if you train thoroughly.  This means that for each behaviour you must apply the 80% correct rule.  This means that you need to get 8 out of 10 rewardable repetitions before you can raise your criteria.  The problem with most training is that the reinforcers are removed too soon – before the behaviour is conditioned.  Conditioned behaviour is something the dog does not have to think about.  He hears (or sees) the cue and his muscle memory takes over.  This conditioning is very much what happens to humans who play a musical instrument or drive a car.

For example, let’s assume that you have planned to practise “sit” in your formal training session.

Step 1:  What are your present criteria for this particular behaviour?  How does it look?  How fast must it be?  Where must it be?  Make a note of this.  Don’t rely on memory – you might remember where you practised two days ago, but I’m pretty sure you won’t remember if you were rewarding ½ second sits, or 2 second sits.

Step 2:  Take out 10 treats and either hold them in your hand (out of sight of the dog) or place them on a surface near you.  For each sit that meets your criteria Click and Treat.  For each non-existent or slow sit, place one of the ten treats to one side.  And continue asking for sits.

Step 3:  At the end of the session count the treats that you put aside.  If there are, say, four, then your dog has only scored 60% and is not ready to move on.  If there are two treats put aside, then your dog has scored 80% and you can think about raising criteria.  You might decide that in your next session you want neater sits.  You will, next session, only reward the neatest sits.  All the other criteria remain the same.  You might be happy with the quality of the sits, but would like to practise the sits in a different environment.  These decisions are up to you.

The point I’m trying to make here is that just because your dog meets all your criteria for sits at home, he will probably not meet the 80% rule when trying sits in the park or at a dog show.  So apply the 80% rule wherever and whenever you train.  If your dog does not make the grade, then your criteria are too high.  Lower your criteria and raise your rate of reinforcement until you are scoring 80% again.

The other thing I am seeing a lot is that too much time is taken to move from one trial of a behaviour to the next.  By trial I mean one individual response (from the animal), to a cue or prompt from the trainer or from the environment.  Jean Donaldson in her book “Culture Clash” puts it very well.  She says “Good trainers are very efficient: as soon as a trial has ended with either a reward, praise, release, NRM (no reward marker) or punishment (see my comment) they immediately commence another trial.  They have great “flow”.  The payoff in terms of efficiency is obvious: more trials per unit time means more progress.  In 10 minutes a good trainer can accomplish more than someone with poor delivery can in an hour, even if their skills match up otherwise.”  She goes on to say “Trainers with good delivery lose the dog a lot less.  Post trial loss of the dog’s attention is a common problem, necessitating time and energy to get the dog refocused before the next trial.”

Comment:  Clarification of some of the terms used in the quotation above:

NRM – No Reward Markers:

Because we are verbal we tend to want to relay information to our dogs by talking or signalling verbally.  A No Reward Marker is our way of letting our dog know that the behaviour that it has just offered is not the behaviour we want (it does not meet our criteria for that particular behaviour) and it must try something else.  Not all dogs perceive an NRM as neutral, however, and some sensitive dogs might regard it as a mild punisher.  If this happens you might find that, over time, the rate of emitted behaviour falls off and your dog becomes reluctant to experiment with new behaviours.

For this reason I hesitate to recommend the use of NRM’s and would much prefer that by clicking and reinforcing the choices you like and ignoring and not reinforcing the choices you don’t like, you allow positive reinforcement and extinction to work together in a powerful way.

Punishers:

Bear in mind that punishment can range from simply withholding a reinforcer on the one hand to physically causing pain on the other.  I, personally, when I am training new behaviours try to keep the session as positive as I can.  If I find that I am withholding reinforcers too frequently, I will review my criteria for that particular response.  Be aware that if you have set your criteria too high and your rate of reinforcement is too low, you are in danger of extinguishing the behaviour altogether.

Another comment:

This rule, obviously, only applies in a formal training session.  However, dogs are learning all the time, so your training in other circumstances needs to be more informal and you will make use of environmental rewards, praise and play.  The important point here is that you must get into the habit of making the most of time spent with your dog.

Rule Structures for Daily Life with Your Dog

When we bring a dog into our homes as a family pet, companion or team member if you do some type of sport with your dog, the very first thing that we must recognise, in all fairness to the dog is that his rules are different from ours, and many behaviours that are unacceptable to us are quite normal for the dog.

For example:

• Dogs that jump up to greet are normal, not bad or naughty;
• Dogs that chew TV remotes, spectacles, cellphones that are left lying around are normal, not bad or naughty;
• Dogs that steal food off the kitchen counter are normal, not bad or naughty;
• Dogs that rush out of the door ahead of you are normal, not bad or naughty;

These are just some dog behaviours that are unacceptable to us.  It is our responsibility, if we are to live in harmony with our dogs to establish boundaries and teach our dogs how to respect them and put into place rule structures that can be incorporated into daily life.  We should also manage the environment in a way that it makes it more difficult for our dog to indulge in inappropriate behaviour.

What we need to do is set a baseline of good behavioural interaction between ourselves and our dogs and to teach them that they must consistently defer to people to receive attention. This is done in a safe, kind, and passive manner. If your dog knows a consistent rule or behaviour will get your attention, it will be receptive to guidance. This is a form of discipline. People often confuse discipline with violence or abuse, but for most dogs withdrawal or withholding of attention is far more profound correction than is physical punishment.  Dogs that are consistently mismanaged with physical punishment either learn to override the punishment or learn to seek it because it may be their most common contact.

The rule is:  the dog must sit and be quiet to earn anything and everything it wants for the rest of its life. This includes sitting for the following:

• Food and feeding
• Treats
• Love
• Grooming
• Being able to go out – and come in
• Having the leash, halter, or harness put on
• Having its feet towelled
• Being invited onto the bed or sofa
• Playing games
• Playing with toys
• Having a tick removed
• Having a wound checked
• Being petted or loved
• Attention
• ANYTHING the dog wants!

All your dog must do is put its bottom on the floor or ground, be quiet, look at you, and await your cue. This takes only seconds, but is invaluable. ALL dogs should learn to do this, and NO dog is too old to learn this.  All puppies should be raised with this simple but powerful deference behaviour. If you put this programme in place you will have a far better relationship with your dog and to able to control him or her without having to restrain him with force.

Start with dinner-time.  If your dog does not already sit for his dinner, now is the time to start.  Get the dinner bowl and stand facing your dog – who might be bouncing up and down ready to dive into the bowl the minute it hits the ground.  Ignore all this and either ask for a sit, or just wait…  your dog will eventually sit and calm down.  When he does, put the bowl down.  If he leaps up before the bowl is on the floor, simply pick it up again, and wait …  Do not give him his food until he has sat and remained calmly sitting until it is on the floor.  What he learns from this is that the bowl does not get put down until he is sitting, and calm.

You want to take your dog for a walk, but the minute you take his lead out he starts bouncing around and acting crazy.  You simply put the lead away and look disinterested.  As soon as the bouncing around has stopped, you take the lead out again – dog bounces around – lead goes away.  He will soon learn that the only way to stop you putting the lead away is to sit calmly.

These are just two examples of teaching your dog about rules, but there are many more situations that apply.

I was reading an article the other day on the 10 Points of Good Discipline.  It wasn’t an article on dog training, but an article on bringing up children.  The interesting thing was that the comments that were made throughout the article could be applied equally to training your dog to be a good citizen.

Some of the points made were:

1. Good discipline teaches.   Punishment teaches what is wrong, but does not help a child (dog) learn what is right.  The goal of discipline is to teach.  It teaches self-control and socially acceptable behaviour.
2. Good discipline is not a power struggle.
3. Good discipline does not involve anger and over-reactions.  It is a planned out strategy to encourage good behaviour and discourage bad behaviour.  It is consistent and fair.
4. Good discipline uses clear expectations, clear consequences, and consistent reinforcement.
5. Good discipline is neither permissive nor punitive.

So let today be the beginning of a great relationship between you and your dog.

A Busy Dog is a Happy Dog

It is recognized nowadays that a dog that is confined for long periods of time without stimulation, both mental and physical, can develop behavioural problems such as chewing of inappropriate items, digging and excessive vocalization, amongst others.  Providing a large area for a dog “to run around in” is not enough, unless this area contains many interesting things to smell and to eat and to look at.  Stimulation should involve all the dog’s senses.

Feral or Village dogs spend about 80% of their waking hours hunting and scavenging for food. Domestic dogs have been helping and working alongside us for thousands of years, and most are bred for a specific purpose, such as hunting, farming or protection. For example, retrievers and pointers were bred to locate and fetch game and water birds. Scent hounds, like coonhounds and beagles, were bred to find rabbits, foxes and other small prey. Dogs like German shepherds, collies, cattle dogs and sheepdogs were bred to herd livestock.

Whether dogs were working for us or scavenging on their own, their survival once depended on lots of exercise and problem solving, all in their quest for food.  Do we provide all this for our pets?  The common scenario for most dogs is that while we’re away at work all day, they sleep.  When we come home, we serve them free food in a bowl—no effort required from them.  They eat more calories than they can use.  The result is dogs who are bored silly, often overweight and have too much energy.  To alleviate this boredom and to get rid of all this excess energy, our pet dog will often indulge in totally unacceptable behaviour such as shredding the outdoor furniture (or even the indoor furniture if she’s confined indoors), tipping up the dustbin (guaranteed to keep her busy for hours), digging holes in a newly planted flower beds.  Her welcome home behaviour will also be a little over the top because she’s so pleased that her boring, unproductive day has come to an end.

If you spend a little time giving your dog “jobs” to do while you’re away, there will be no unpleasant surprises for you when you get home, and you will also have a calmer, more relaxed and “fulfilled” pet, without having to start taking up sheep or cattle herding, or hunting ducks and geese.

In my next post I’ll discuss some ways that you can keep your dog “busy” and happy.

Your Relationship with your Dog

Biologists, breeders and trainers, and champion sled dog racers, Raymond and Lorna Coppinger have more than four decades of experience with literally thousands of dogs.  They are co-authors of the book DOGS: A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF CANINE ORIGIN, BEHAVIOR, AND EVOLUTION and in a discucssion about the relevance of the alpha-dog/dominance theory in training dogs they were asked how they thought people should think about their relationship with their dog?

Their reply was:

It is through social play behavior that animals learn from one another. Further, it is fun to play with our dogs even if none of us learn anything. It will certainly make more sense to the dog than to be tumbled onto its back and growled at by a human.

Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff have recently drawn attention to a category of behaviors they call intentional icons. Dogs have signals they use when they want to play — the play bow. The play bow is a signal that all the following behaviors like growls and snarls are all in fun. Consider what might happen if you gave the “dominant male” intentional icon, indicating everything that happens from now on is about the driver being the dominant dog. The sled dogs, if they were reacting as submissive wolves, would then lie on their backs and pee in the air instead of running as a team.

Instead of threatening our dogs every time we want to train them, we need to perfect the human play bow which tells the dog the games are about to begin. Remember that games have rules, and what the dog and the humans learn during play is what the rules of the game are. That makes sense in teaching or training, whether it is dogs or students. The intent of dominance display is to exclude the subordinate from some activity, like breeding. The alpha wolf isn’t trying to teach the subordinate anything.”

Next time you are training your dog ask yourself whether both of you are enjoying yourselves…  Look at your dog’s body language as well as your own.  Are you sending out the right signals for your dog to be able to learn, or are you being confrontational?  Do your games have rules, and does your dog know the rules?   Try to stop thinking about your dog as an adversary or subordinate, and rather start thinking of him as a team member.  And next time you hear anything about the “wolf-pack” or dominance and submission, heed wolf expert David Mech’s words -  “Hopefully it will take fewer than 20 years for the media and the public to fully adopt the correct terminology and thus to once and for all end the outmoded view of the wolf pack as an aggressive assortment of wolves consistently competing with each other to take over the pack.”

Consequences

I wrote a post recently about behaviour and consequences and how consequences drive behaviour.

Many of us try to direct behaviour by controlling the dog…  We push the dog’s rear end down to get him to sit; we use the leash to get him away from another dog; we use a long line to get him to come to us amidst distractions.

Surely it is better to control the consequences by keeping the dog focussed and working without leases and long line while slowly adding distractions and distance?  From my experience, it is far better to combine a very high rate of reinforcement with high value reinforcers to control consequences, rather than to try and control the dog.  This way we let the dog learn to make appropriate choices .

I’m sure most of us are very familiar with withholding the dog’s dinner until he or she sits!   This is a perfect example of manipulating a consequence to get behaviour.  Another example, if you’re training a gundog to be steady, would be picking up the dummy if the dog breaks, so removing the dog’s ability to be reinforced with the retrieve.

Is Your Dog a Good Citizen?

By far most students that come to my school for training do not wish to become obedience or agility champions, but merely want a well-mannered dog; a dog that they can take on walks without being pulled along; a dog that can calmly and appropriately greet other dogs they meet either on or off-lead; a dog that knows how to greet people who approach him; a dog that will come when called.  To this end the South African Kennel Union has compiled a test which, when passed, certifies that your dog is a good citizen!

The test has three levels – Bronze, Silver and Gold.  To give you some idea of what is required at the Bronze level, the tasks that your team, consisting of yourself and your dog, need to pass are:

Test 1 :  ACCEPTING A STRANGER

This Test is to see that a stranger can approach the dog and handler in a casual, everyday situation. Ignoring the dog the Evaluator will walk up to the handler and greet him in a friendly way and shake hands. The dog must show no signs of resentment or shyness and must not leave his position to go to the stranger. Sitting politely for petting by a friendly stranger, with the dog sitting at the handler’s side, the Evaluator pats the dog only on the head and body, and then circles the dog and handler which completes the Test. The dog must not show shyness or resentment.

Test 2 :  PUTTING ON A COLLAR AND LEAD

The dog should have a well fitting buckle or slip collar of leather, fabric or chain. Special collars such as “pinch” or “spike” collars are not permitted. The lead must be either leather or fabric.

Test 3:  PRESENT FOR EXAMINATION ON A LEAD

The purpose of this Test is to see if the dog can be examined by a Judge or a Vet without it becoming aggressive or flinching. On a lead the handler will present the dog to the Evaluator for a gentle examination of its mouth, teeth, throat, eyes, ears and feet.

Test 4:   GROOM

The Evaluator will inspect the dog to see if it appears healthy, is clean and  groomed and will permit a stranger such as a vet or groomer to examine it. The Evaluator then combs or brushes the dog and lightly  examines the ears and front of each foot to see if it will accept grooming from someone  other than its owner

Test 5:   PRAISE/PRESENTATION

The Test is to demonstrate that a dog can be calmed easily following praise or play and can leave the Test in a well mannered fashion. The handler may praise the dog verbally, by petting, by playing with a toy and/or via a favourite trick, in the allowed ten (10) seconds of play and then must calm the dog for the next test.

Test 6:   RELEASE FROM LEAD, PLAY WITH OR WITHOUT TOY, RECALL AND ATTACH LEAD

The purpose of this Test is to see if a dog can play happily off lead and be recalled and be put back on lead. The handler will release the dog from the lead and either play with it or throw some object for it to fetch and play with, then recall the dog and place back on lead.

Test 7:   WALK ON LEAD WITHOUT DISTRACTION (WALKING ON A LOOSE LEAD)

The purpose of this Test is to demonstrate that the handler is in control. The dog must be on the left side of the handler but need not be in the “heel” position. There should be no doubt that the dog’s attention is on the handler and it responds to movements and changes of direction. The course taken must include a left turn, right turn, an about turn, a stop in between and at the end of the Test. The dog does not have to be perfectly aligned with the handler, nor sit when the handler stops.

Test 8:   WALK ON LEAD, PASSING THROUGH A DOOR OR GATE

The dog should walk confidently through the door/gate and should not shy away from it.

Test 9:   WALK ON A LEAD PASSING PEOPLE AND DOGS

This Test is to demonstrate that the dog should have no difficulty in walking through pedestrian traffic. The dog should walk around close to at least four (4) persons one of whom should have a dog. The dog may show interest in the strangers and the dog, but should continue to walk without any evidence of shyness or over exuberance and should not be pulling at the lead. Throughout this Test the handler may encourage, praise or talk to the dog.

Test 10 :  REACTION TO ANOTHER DOG

This Test is to demonstrate the proper behaviour in the presence of other dogs. Starting at a distance of ten (10) metres from each other, two handlers walk towards each other, meet, stop, shake hands, exchange a few words and continue for about five (5) metres. The dogs should demonstrate only casual interest. Neither dog should go to the other dog or handler.

Test 11:  LIE DOWN AND STAY TO COMMAND

This Test is to demonstrate that the dog has some training and will respond to the handler’s commands. Taking reasonable time, the handler commands the dog first to “sit” and then to “lie down”, using as many commands as he likes. He must not force the dog into position. The “stay” command is then given and the handler walks about seven (7) metres from the dog and returns at a natural walking pace to the dog, which must maintain its position until the handler returns and the Evaluator gives permission for the dog to move.

Test 12:   REACTION TO DISTRACTIONS

This Test is to demonstrate the dog is confident at all times when facing a distraction. The Evaluator must select two (2) of the following for this Test (they need not be the same for each dog).

1. Simulation of a handicapped person with crutches, a walker or a wheelchair (manual or motorised).

2. Sudden opening or closing of a door or solid gate.

3. Dropping a large book or similar object behind the dog but no closer than three (3) metres.

4. A jogger passing in front of the dog.

5. Good natured pushing or shoving or animated talk, excited talk and back slapping by people, with the dog and handler passing within three (3) metres.

6. Someone pushing a pram, or shopping cart from the front or rear and passing within two (2) metres of the dog and handler.

7. A cyclist passing in front or from the rear within two (2) metres of the dog and handler.

The dog may express natural curiosity and interest and may startle, but should not panic, try to run away, show aggressiveness or bark.

Test 13:   SUPERVISED ISOLATION

This Test is to demonstrate a dog can be left alone if necessary, whilst maintaining its training and good manners. Evaluators are encouraged to say something like “would you like me to watch your dog while you make your call?”, both to add a touch of reality and to accentuate the fact that leaving a dog tied up and unsupervised is not condoned. The dog will be attached to a two (2) metre line. It does not have to stay in position but should not continually bark, whine, howl, pace unnecessarily or show any behaviour with a mild agitation or nervousness.

NB. Tests 12 & 13 may be conducted in a group.

Why not go through the list today, and see how many of these tasks your dog can complete.  A participant may take all the Tests at one time or singly, as they wish. As each Test is completed, the Evaluator will mark the Test Sheets “Passed” or “Not Ready”.  Participants whose sheets are marked “Passed” may pass onto the next Test. Those marked “Not Ready” will have to be tested again on that  particular task.

Once all the Tests have been completed and marked “Passed” and signed off, the Club or organising body will issue the dog with a rosette and a numbered KUSA Canine Good Citizen Certificate and return their copy of the completed Test sheet to KUSA for record keeping.