How a Simple Touch Can Transform Your Training

Hand targeting is one of the easiest behaviors to teach your dog.  Your dog targets everything with their nose, we simply give their nose something to run into - the palm of our hand.  Our hand goes down, the dog runs their nose into our palm, we mark and reward the “touch”

Great, we have a dog who will happily target our hand.  But now what?  Why are we teaching our dog to target our hand?  It’s cute, it’s fun for the dog, it’s easy.  But what’s the practical purpose?  Here’s a few great uses of a well trained targeting behavior.

1. Distracting and Engagement  Targeting is an excellent way to distract your dog when she’s excited, anxious, or bored. This is incredibly useful in various situations: at the vet's office, during breaks in training classes, or while waiting for… anything. The "touch my hand" game is fun and engaging for both you and your dog, helping them pass the time or alleviating worry about their current environment or an unknown situation.

   
   

2. Improved Recall.  Augment your dog's recall with a hand target at the end. This provides an additional incentive for your dog to get to you as quickly as possible, making your recall even stronger.

   
   

3. Follow/move! Have you ever had your dog sprawled in the middle of the hallway, and your request to "move" results in them stretching and rolling onto their back, clearly misunderstanding? Dogs generally dislike being physically manipulated—collar grabs or yanking them out of the way can be uncomfortable and may lead to unwanted reactive behaviors. Instead, use that hand target to ask them to move over! Once your dog is regularly targeting, start moving your hand. Your target then becomes a "follow”, allowing you to ask your dog to move with your hand target.

   
   

4. Leash Walking  There are many ways to show your dog what we expect when walking on a leash - your hand target can help!  Drop your hand, your dog goes to target, we start moving - your hand has become a moving reminder on where you wish your dog’s nose to be while walking.

   
   

5. Remote Targeting  Now that we have some great uses for our hand target, we can transfer that behavior to another object - a remote target.  This can be a dowel with a rubber tip, a cone, just about anything!  Warm up your touch behavior and bring in the remote target - simply mark and reward the touch on the object and slowly start moving the target away from you.  Now you can send your dog to the target!  Useful for loading up in the car, or getting past scary doorways, or moving your dog from place to place without physical manipulation.

Targeting - easy to teach, and so very, very useful!

Gentle Touch Pet Training, Training dogs on the Central Coast with Positive Reinforcement since 1999