We have this client with one of the most food-motivated dogs I’ve ever met.
The boy goes nuts for snacks we’d normally consider boring:
✅ Dry dog biscuits.
✅ Kibble.
✅ LETTUCE.
Doesn’t matter. He’s obsessed with it all. Which sure makes my job easier. We have to get more creative with the non-foody types.
“Buddy” had never been trained with reward-based methods before he met us. But once he realized he could earn treats for right answers and not be punished for wrong answers, he came to life. He’s a bonafide training nerd now.
One of the skills we’re working on is Place, aka Go Lie Down On Your Bed.
Buddy caught on to the idea real fast.
“Go to my bed? Absolutely! Just keep those kibbles coming!”
The problems began when we started leveling up, asking him to stay on the bed longer, or stay while his human walked further away. His performance became much less consistent.
For a few reps in a row, he’d do it perfectly! And then on the next rep, he refused to stay on the bed. It was like he suddenly had no idea what was being asked.
An intriguing puzzle for the dog trainer. A source of much frustration for the poor client.
(I want to be clear that none of this is a mark against the client – these folks came to us with a scary, confusing behavior issue in their dog, and they’ve truly impressed us with their dedication, hard work, and willingness to try new things.)
“Buddy definitely knows what to do,” they lamented to me in a coaching session. “He just doesn’t want to.”
Sure, that’s an understandable assumption.
But is it accurate?
Let’s look at the facts:
1️⃣ Buddy loves training. He loves food. He’d happily jump through a flaming hoop over a pool of piranhas if it meant there was a chance of getting a single piece of kibble.
2️⃣ Dogs are all about efficiency. They want to know the fastest way to get what they want.
So the question is:
If Buddy truly knew how to earn that treat, wouldn’t he be doing it? All he has to do is stay on his bed, and he’d get all the kibbles he wants! So why is he wasting all that time?
Breaking the stay, running to his human, getting sent back to the mat, then having to wait for his owner to walk away, THEN walk back and finally give him his treat…
It sure is a lot of unnecessary fussing for a dog who “knows” exactly how to earn the reward.
It’s more likely that he doesn’t really get it.
He has a rudimentary understanding of the game, but once the scenario looks a bit different, he’s lost. Sort of like how I can understand a few words in German, but I’d be absolutely lost if someone actually tried to speak German with me.
So how did we fix it?
Reasons why a dog might break a stay or otherwise not do something they “know how to do”
There are so many reasons. I can think of at least a dozen off the top of my head.
The Academy has resources that go more in-depth on a lot of them, but for today’s quick little post, I’ll run through three of the ones that applied to Buddy.
1. Mixed (hand) signals
We reviewed training footage Buddy’s mom “Laura” sent us, and one thing jumped out:
Laura’s hand signal and body language cues for Stay looked almost exactly like that for the Hand Target cue, where you want the dog to boop your palm with their nose.
Hand targeting was Buddy’s strongest skill.
It was clear that some of these broken stays were because Buddy genuinely thought Laura wanted a hand target.
2. Not enough training of the release cue
It might feel counterintuitive, but if you want your dog to be really good at Stay, they need to be really good at the cue that means You Can Get Up Now.
This was my bad, as the trainer. I made the rookie mistake of treating the release cue as an afterthought, and skimped on teaching this skill to Laura and Buddy. The release cue needs to be trained, proofed, and leveled-up as methodically and intentionally as any other cue. Because without clarity on exactly what means stay and what means get up, the dog can only guess.
I’m sure poor Buddy was all like:
“Mom just dipped her head the way she does when she gives the release word. Do I go now?”
“Mom usually says my name when she wants me to come towards her. She just said ‘Buddy, stay.’ Here I come, mom!”
3. Lack of feedback on the waiting part
This is a trap a lot of us fall into when increasing duration with a stay. At the beginning of training, you use a really high rate of reinforcement. Giving the dog food rewards every few seconds.
And you’re right, that’s not sustainable. We do need to reduce the frequency of rewards over time.
Here’s the potential problem:
Your dog notices that you aren’t giving as many treats as you used to.
Question: What has your dog learned from previous training experiences, like sit, roll over, and other tricks?
Answer: That when you withhold the treat, it’s because they’re doing it wrong.
It’s reasonable (and pretty dang smart!) for a dog to extrapolate this knowledge into all training experiences.
I’m pretty sure this was part of the issue for Buddy. See, before Place, we introduced him to a training method called shaping. In really oversimplified terms, shaping is a guessing game where the dog tries different behaviors to see which one you want.
If they guess wrong, you quietly wait for them to try something else.
Buddy LOVED the guessing game, the little nerd. And I’d wager that when the rewards slowed down for his mat stay, some part of his doggy brain reasoned:
“Oh, I must not be getting it right. I’ll try some other things to see what works.”
So we made a few adjustments:
✅ Cleaned up the hand signals and release cue.
✅ Added a duration marker.
You’re probably familiar with the basic marker, where you say “yes” or use a clicker to tell the dog they did the right thing and they get a prize.
For best results with duration behaviors, you also need a marker that means “you’re doing the right thing… keep doing exactly that and eventually you’ll get the treat.”
You can’t use your regular marker for this, because the rule for that is one mark, one treat ASAP. So you can’t exactly say yes and then wait twenty seconds to deliver the reward.
To keep things simple for Buddy and his family, we went with a two-marker system:
“Yes” for the regular marker. “Good dog” as a duration marker that means he’s on the right track.
✅ We also started to make mat training sessions look more like real life.
Think about how Place gets practiced in a training session:
You’re focused 100% on the dog, being deliberate with your movements, probably backing away slowly saying “stay, staaaay…” and also sprinkling in some other commands to practice. So it’s normal for dogs (like Buddy) to be on high alert, eagerly awaiting the next command.
Real life doesn’t look like that.
In real life, you’re not focused on the dog. You have your hands full with a million different tasks and you just need them to go lie down and stay out of the way while you cook dinner, or change your baby’s diaper, or socialize with your dinner guests.
Erin went to Buddy’s house for an in-person session. While she talked with the clients, she had Buddy lie on his mat next to her. Erin didn’t look at him much, and didn’t ask him to do anything else. She just periodically put a kibble on his mat.
For thirty minutes, the humans chatted.
Buddy realized that nothing else was happening, and all he had to do to get snacks was… nothing. Just stay on the mat. Easy peasy. For thirty minutes, Buddy stayed. Chilled out, even. He’d never done that before.
Erin started throwing in some distractions, asking the clients to ring the doorbell.
(One of the reasons they hired us was to get Buddy to stop going crazy at the doorbell.)
Because this was his first time ever working on this, he did get up a couple times. But he’d give just one bark (a big improvement!), and hurry back to the mat. The mat became a Buddy magnet, a source of predictability and stability.
So there ya go. Another case of He Knows What To Do, He Just Doesn’t Want To, solved.
This was not a dog problem. This was a human problem. Turns out, Buddy didn’t actually know what to do at all. And once he did know, he was thrilled to do it.
The moral of the story
Always question your assumptions.
You won’t find the answers in “ugh, how do I get this dog to do what he’s told.”
But you might find them in “why is this dog having a hard time with this?”
Bonus points and our undying affection for “how can I change my behavior to help them figure it out?”
