Teaching your dog to back up gives you a fun trick that’s also great for fitness and will impress your family and friends. There are many ways to train tricks, so I’m sharing what you need to know about backing up with my top tips for maintaining criteria and the strategy I use.
Training a back up involves teaching your dog to reverse walk with coordinated steps, making it a great activity for core strengthening, paw proprioception, and balance. It will also help your dog be confident using their paws independently. While there are various methods available, not all are effective or clear for the dog. We want to ensure our dogs understand the criteria without confusion or frustration to create success.
So, when I say the word ‘back’ to my dog, I want them to reverse walk. So, if they walk front right, left rear, left front, right rear, that pattern of footfalls, I want them to just do the opposite when they're walking.
So, I don't want them to like shuffle in their front and bump and hop in their back. I don't want them to throw all four feet up in the air and land and throw and land. I want a reverse walk. That's what back means. And it's a great, great exercise for fitness. I like to teach my dogs to back-up stairs, to back over things.
So, the most common way people will teach you, and you can Google this on YouTube, I'm sure there's a lot of different ways that people will teach you and a lot of them I'm not fond of. First one, people will tell you, “Walk into the dog and your physical presence is going to intimidate them so that they'll move away. And when they move away, start saying ‘back, back, back’ and give them a cookie when they move away.”
Problem with that is they're not going to move unless you move into them. It's going to take a very, very, very long time for that dog to figure it out. And they really don't know what they're doing because they're moving away because of your pressure, right?
So, let's keep the criteria of what we want but change the strategy. That's not a strategy that's going to work.
Here's one of the very first things I did was I used my couch and a coffee table. And I called my dog between the couch and the coffee table, and then I was there the dog couldn't turn around and so they just backed up and I said ‘yes,’ and I rolled a cookie between their legs, and they kept backing up to find the cookie that I rolled between their legs. Simple.
But the problem with that is then you have to fade the couch and the coffee table. So, you could just shape. And I gave you the hint to how I like to shape it. And that is I'm watching the dog, any motion back I click, and I roll the cookie between their legs.
Eventually I don't even use a clicker, I just throw the cookie between their legs. And I want them to back-up straight.
So, I'm very cognizant of ‘are they backing in one direction or the other?’ Now, the final way that I like to teach a back-up is to teach the dog to target their back paws on something.
So, these are all different strategies. If they can back-up one step to get those paws up on a target, and the target could be like a couch cushion if you want, then move them like one step away from that couch cushion and they're going back-up two steps. And throw the cookie between their legs. I like to reinforce them coming forward and backwards, so I get balance.
Because if you don't have balance, then you're going to get a dog that just throws himself backwards. So, there's what four or five different strategies for one behavior. We can change the strategy but changing the criteria just grows confusion in the dog and confusion will lead to frustration for both of you. Because at the end of the day, you're not getting the behavior you're hoping to and your dog is desperately trying to figure out how to earn that reinforcement, but there's a lack of clarity for him.
And at the end of the day, remember our dogs are always doing the best they can with the education we've given them in the environment that we've put them in.
So, we need to change the education or the environment in order to help them be the best for us. It's a win-win for everybody.
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