Introduction
Dog’s come with a range of natural impulses often relating to their survival. Your dog may snatch treats out of your hand or even your treat bag or try to chase everything in sight! This means that teaching impulse control depends very much on the natural impulses of the dog in question.
Impulse control could be taught as:
1. a stay (for a dog with a high chase drive) while a chase trigger is present in the environment, or
2. a food request behaviour (for a dog who has a high food drive or tends to snatch) or
3. a send away from a toy or mat (for a dog with an intense relationship with a particular toy or mat) to another do a task.
How hard should it be?
It’s important to work in the right way but also at the level that is right for your dog where by far and away the majority of repetitions are successful. Correcting your dog for giving into their impulses doesn’t teach them impulse control.
Case Study
In this video I’m working with Annie, who has now been with us just under 2 weeks at the time of this video. She has had limited human contact until coming to us so is still tentative about taking food out of my hand so using this as an impulse control exercise would not be effective. Annie’s only social contact for the majority of her life was her littermates which means that she is highly impulsive around my two older dogs, jumping on them and even trying to take food out of their mouths as well as biting all around their faces. And as a border collie who has a naturally high chase drive, she loves chasing them!
So the impulses I’m working with here are – puppy play and chasing.
I wanted to show Annie that she could be calm around the older dogs and that simply laying calmly around them was even better than indulging her natural impulses. I did two parts to this training. One is showing her that she can be calm settled on her mat with the two older dog along side also eating treats. I started by giving her a handful of treats and saying the name of the other dogs as I give them their treats and gradually tried to reduce the number of treats she was getting so that she spent some time watching them getting theirs. For the other part of the training I took her outside and taught her that she could lay calmly while one of the others ran through a tunnel. She has rehearsed chasing him through the tunnel previously and loves it, you can see her higher level of arousal, however, she manages to stay settled on her mat.
If your dog is stealing food or chasing cars and bicycles contact me now for support https://www.harmony.dog/contact/
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