Clean Run Magazine - January 2010 - 30

It should be rewarding for your dog to chew on the flavorful fabric of the TNT and to play tug with you. You should not open the toy and give out the goodies like you are handing over bills from a wallet. Under no circumstances should a TNT or any food toy be treated like a bait bag! A 1. Dog or toy on leash 2. You need a motivated handler and a hungry dog 3. Move yourself and the toy away from your dog, teasing and luring 4. Don’t grab at the toy after the dog picks it up — let him capture and kill it 5. Be sneaky, gentle, and playful, not domineering and controlling while playing 6. Get down at your dog’s level when teaching play 7. Don’t use a TNT like a bait bag Guidelines for Using a Food Toy But Why Do I Need to Use a Toy in the First Place? The goal is to be able to use any kind of toy to get your dog to retrieve and subsequently tug with you. Some dogs learn to tug but not retrieve. Others learn to retrieve items like tennis balls, but will not interact with you and the toy in a game of tug. The handler is simply seen as the “ball-throwing mechanism.” Your goal should be to try to create both a retriever and a tugger. Why? Lots of handlers have successfully reached the top of the agility ladder using food. What’s wrong with using food? Food is an important part of most training programs. Since dogs need food to live, we can control some of our dogs’ drives by using food. Food is very helpful when you are trying to teach a new skill that requires lots of quick repetitions and when you are shaping behaviors and want to indicate tiny portions of correct behaviors very quickly. So food is important, but using it correctly is more important, and it should never take the place of toy training with your dog. Toys help to keep our dogs interested in us longer than a quick treat popped in their mouth. Toys can help build drive. They can be thrown or placed somewhere to indicate a spot for the dog to run to. I am not going to try to convince you to use a toy. If you are reading this, I hope you already know the benefits of having a dog that plays with you, and you are trying to learn how you can better create that tugging maniac. Step 1 Step 2 Teaching Your Dog to Play with the TNT The first step in teaching your dog to play should be to try to interest your dog in some kind of a soft toy, rope, or piece of fabric, and to motivate him to interact with you and the toy. But if you have exhausted yourself trying to get your dog to play with soft toys, rope toys, squeaky toys, regular balls, balls on a rope, soft Frisbees, and even real fur tugs, and your dog still sitting there indifferently while you play madly with all these cool things, then you’re ready to try a fabric-covered food toy to teach your dog how to play. If your dog will eat food, it is likely you can teach him to play using a TNT. The goal is to get your dog to play tug with the food-holding toy and then start switching over to using other toys that do not contain food. The TNT or any other food toy should be treated like a “transition toy,” a play-training tool. Using a TNT correctly should help you to teach your dog how to play with any toy. Step 3 Step 1: Let the Dog Taste the Toy First, get your dog to put his mouth on the fabric “container” and taste that there is food behind the fabric. Your dog must taste the toy before you try to move the toy or try to get him to tug with it. Don’t feed your dog a meal 12 hours before starting this training. Put a hunk of steak, chicken, cooked liver, or raw meat into the TNT. A hunk of food that the dog cannot easily tear apart into smaller pieces is best at this point. Choose the size and density of the food to complement the size of your dog and his mouth. Don’t close the TNT all the way; let the end of the hunk of meat stick out of the top of it. Sit on the floor and hold on to the body of the TNT rather than the handle (this way you can keep some pressure on the TNT to keep it partially closed). Don’t move the TNT or yourself, and don’t let go of it. Clean Run | January 10

Clean Run Magazine - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run Magazine - January 2010