Last week, Danger and I got to hang out with the Telluride ski patrol and learn a few tricks. One that didn’t go as well as planned was Danger’s attempt to ride the chair lift. . .

Eric and Wylie

Generally, digging dogs are a nuissance but I thought we should teach Danger to dig on command in case he ever needs to dig me out of an avalanche or help me burrow in for the night. How to do it: Bury some jerky in the snow or soft dirt. Show him where it is. Click him for digging down to it. Simple stuff. Just remember to click the actual paw stroke. I found that Danger would look at me and take one swipe at the dirt to test whether that’s what he was being clicked for. Fun stuff.

Cool-Hand Danger, why are you digging out my hole?

Danger and his pal Cossette

Danger gets ready to spin the bottle

Here’s a classic trick that never gets old: Play dead. Use a clicker to shape this behavior. The click should come right at the moment when the dog has completed the task. Early on, you might click just for him lying down and then for flopping over onto his side a bit. With a dog that’s had some clicker training before and knows that he’s got to offer a behavior to get the click, this should go quickly. You can teach a roll-over the same way.

What’s not to love about Ski Santa Fe? The same slopes we were hunting September we’re skiing in November. Cooper was too young to hunt this year, but he’s just the right age to get started on snow. We’re going to spend a lot of time talking about how to ski with your dog this winter. Everyone loves to do it, but few people do it safely. Of the Outside dogs that accompany us on morning hike-up laps, none have escaped a laceration either from a ski edge or a snowmobile. The reason it happens is simple: The owner has no control over the dog when new and exciting distractions are introduced. A few people have told me that I’m no fun for making my dogs heel. But that’s not quite right. The point is: Make sure your dog can heel and will come when called (even when skiers or snowmobiles are zipping by). Then when you release your dog to run and play, you can do so with the confidence that he’s not a danger to himself.

Safety Note: If you're going to try this with a bottle, make sure your dog's hold is bulletproof.

Some folks were asking whether Danger can do that beer trick from last week’s short movie, “In the Face of Danger,” in one take. Yes, and chances are your dog can too. Training a dog to connect tricks or behaviors end to end is called chaining. Typically, these types of linked behaviors are taught back to front, or what’s called back-chaining. Basically, you start with the last part of the task, train that to proficiency, and then add the next-to-last part. Withhold your reward until the dog completes both of these well-polished tasks end to end. It won’t take him long to figure out that the criteria have been raised and he now has to do two tasks before the reward. Then add a third link in the chain and so on. When you see dogs performing complex, apparently human-like tasks on TV, this is generally how they’re taught.

OK, here’s the video.

How To Teach Your Dog To Fetch A Beer from Walker Parks on Vimeo.

Danger and I spent last week with Allison Otto and the Serac Adventure Film School making a movie about Danger’s attempts to become a tracking dog. Here’s Allison’s excellent movie. Please share it with your friends.

Danger's ready for a loose-leash walk

Every dog must learn to walk on a leash. Mike covered informal heeling off-lead, using a slip collar. Here’s how the ADW trainers do it with their service dogs.

The Ideal Scenario: ADW teaches loose-lead walking (and heeling, once you unsnap the lead) with a clicker and treats. It’s incredibly simple. Say your walk cue, Let’s go or heel, and set off. As long as the dog is in the heeling zone next to your knee, click and treat frequently. Then gradually lengthen the amount of time and distance required for a treat. Most dogs are pretty quick to figure out that their place in relation to the handler is what draws the treat. I also like to look for frequent eye contact. You can promote this by clicking when you’re getting a good heel position and the dog looks up at you. Eye contact means the dog’s focus is on you and not what’s going on in the world. The nice thing about this method is that it doesn’t require any force, a must for service dogs who will be handled by people with disabilities.

The Problem of the Outgoing Dog: With Danger, I’ve found that as soon as I give him his treat he suddenly speeds up and is out ahead foraging and looking for people and other dogs to greet. Like most training issues, the tasks are easy; the self-control is hard.

1. Start with a preemptive leave it when obvious distractions are coming down the path toward you. Most problems of pulling can be fixed with a well-conditioned “leave it.”
2. Some of the books I’ve been reading lately explain the dog’s urge to go ahead as an attempt to become a pack leader. Others explain it simply: Because it works. Whether it’s the former or the latter doesn’t matter; you can’t give in. When he goes ahead, stop, get him to come back whatever way works best. Then make him wait. Then set off again. Don’t let him pull you even a little. Just a few inches of give can reinforce the behavior.
3. Like anything, loose-leash walking is much easier to teach if it’s started at a young age. Train it in as a good habit early, rather than trying to fix a bad habit late.
4. If all else fails, use punishment. We’ll go over punishment in another installment.

A Good Exercise

1. Walk Toward a Goal: In this one, Sue set out a bowl of food at the end of a hallway. Danger and I set off toward it and as long as he was walking at my knee, we could keep going. As soon as he moved ahead we had to go back to the starting line. This is a great one to teach a dog self control because calmness and patience are the only way to ge that big reward. And you don’t need to use food, either. We repeated the exercise with another dog that Danger really wanted to meet as the reward on the other side of the room. As long as he walked at heel he’d get to greet the other dog.

Danger opens the fridge to get himself a snack

After learning push, tug came easy for Danger. Ever tried to wrench a favorite sock from your dog’s mouth? The instinct is to tug back. Dangle an enticing rag or rope in front of your dog and you’ll get the same response. But tug as a service dog skill is a bit more nuanced. You don’t want your dog to rip or yank as hard as possible, rather you want him to have a bit more tact. How you click and treat to end up with a crisp, gentle tug depends on your dog’s disposition.

1. If your dog is the sort that really loves to play tug and hates to stop, click only for a gentle tug at the outset. If your dog is less forceful to begin with, just click when he grasps the rag in his mouth.
2. Now shape the kind of tug you want. Danger has a soft mouth; in the first step all he’d do was hold the rag in his mouth. To get him to tug, I pulled sharply on the rag—just as hard as I wanted him to tug—while he held on. I clicked when he held on. This produced the right level of force. If your dog is more of the tugging type, be careful to avoid clicking for the sort of tug that involves head-shaking and growling.
3. Now, if there’s a specific place on the rope or rag that you want him to tug—say, the tip for more leverage—click only for that. Make sure he’s successful 80 percent of the time before you move on to the next step.
4. Once he’s consistently giving you the desired tug you want when presented with something to pull on, add the cue.
5. After a few more training sessions, you’ll be ready to generalize the skill by tying the tug rope onto different objects like doors, drawers, and the fridge. A great exercise to work on is combining push with tug. The dog opens and closes a door, resetting his own training drill and receiving a treat each time.