Hey everyone, it's Laura V here and my best friend Chester and today, hi buddy, today we wanna talk to you about how important it is to get your dog to stay. Sometimes you just need your dog to stay where they are and usually that's for their own safety and their own wellbeing. The other great thing about teaching your dog to stay is it teaches them impulse control. Really important to teach your dog to control themselves as much as possible. So we do this in very small increments.
Getting our puppy to learn to stay for a very short period of time, knowing and being able to predict that you're coming back very soon and something awesome is on the way. So I'm gonna do a bit of a demo with Chester here. If he can take his face away from getting the treats on the floor. Buddy, you can't have those, they're freebies.
So what we want to do is we wanna get him to sit or to drop, or to stand, it doesn't matter. We want basically him to stay in position, no matter where he is or what he's doing and then we're gonna do very short gradual increases of time and distance.
So let's see how we go with Chester, my best friend. All right, so I might get him to, for example, to sit, good boy, and to stay for one second, free. And then I release him immediately. So here's the hand signal in which we just get him to stay in position just for one second, or even half a second, and then you must release your dog from what they were doing with the word free.
That's really really important because that lets our dog or our puppy know that they don't have to be doing that anymore. So let's try it again. Hey Chester, sit, yes, stay, one, two, free. Good boy, well done.
Now what you can do is work on this for a couple minutes a day, make it really short, really sweet, building that bond of trust and respect with your puppy. Then you'll be able to, eventually, get them to stay in the position for longer and you'll be able to move away further, return to them, and heavily reward them for that incredible impulse control.
So let's see if we can do that with Chester. Hey Chester, sit, yes, so I mark the fact that he sat because I asked him to do that and he's done it. Stay, I can move away. You may need to remind your puppy to stay if you need to. You must always return back to your dog, yes. Mark the fact that he stayed, free, and make that choice the best thing he could have ever done.
So make sure you reward your puppy with more than what they're expecting if they've done more than, perhaps, what you expected them to do. Once again, make this fun, and it's such important stuff to teach your dog to control their impulses and to be able to trust you, knowing that you're gonna come back and everything's gonna be okay.
