Service dogs: Using Prey Model Training with Young Dogs

This article is about dogs who have completed Social Method foundation training and are now age 8 mos - 2 years.  These dogs are training at level 1 or 2 level in DTC Main 1 ESD.

When training service dogs, we want our working dog or dog in training to offer obedience and social passive social skills throughout the dog day.  Each dog we train does have some type of behavior issues that we are working on managing.   We learned that bait training with food, lure and reward style is not the preferred method of training but does have its place when training a service dog.

Each service dog is expected to wait for the handler.  When we select young dogs between the ages of 8 months and 3 years, the dog often has too much energy.  So we focus on treadmill exercise, weight training and building strength and healthy muscle tone to support long term training as mobile assistants for example.

Once the fitness workouts are in daily order, we can begin to focus on obedience training exercises that work on your dog’s mind set.  When you work on static training exercises, you are working on holding a position for a designated period of time.  This does utilize your dog’s energy and prey mind set when using food.    For example, we want our service dog to hold the long down for 1.5 hours while we do computer work at our desk.  A high energy dog that is prey driven is not capable of doing this at first. 

We begin with our social training first.  We show the dog his place and give him rules to follow while in our office space.  After 6 weeks of completing social training exercise placement on bed at the office as well as obedience exercise long down, we are able to begin baiting the dog with food while he holds his position.  Our goal is to give him food when he is quiet, relaxed, asleep.  This believe it or not will drain your dogs mental energy.  Holding still is based on mind set, calm and focused. 

Think of this, if the dog is ancestral and has found a rabbit hole, he stands outside of the hole for hours, then begins to tire mentally and physically, so he digs.  Then he tires more and lays down.  Then when he is motionless with shallow relaxed breathing, eyes closed when the rabbit appears.  He is experienced so he knows what the rabbit is and lunges at the precise moment.  Now he holds the rabbit in his mouth crushing down strongly, then he begins to tear the fur, the skin and the flesh of the rabbit.  Now he has eaten.    He gets up and moves along to the next meal.

Both examples are of passive prey behavior that dogs instinctual display.  When you choose to bait with food you are using your dog’s prey drive.  For obedience training a service dog you want to give your bait feed at the precise right time.  Your dog already knows the training exercise, the rules and is socially cooperative with you.  You are now aiming to get the dogs passive prey behavior to tone down or become satisfied with staying still, holding the position, relax, go to sleep.  We only employ this prey method if we are working with a young dog who does have un-channeled prey drive that we were unable to abolish during social method training.

As your young service dog matures in age from 1 year to 2 years of age and continues ongoing training to more advanced levels of service dog mobility assistance training with you, he will begin to show more obedience to you, and less impulsive prey behavior.  This is combined with proper daily workouts in fitness to, so he has an outlet for draining energy and maintaining muscle tone.  Sparingly use food to bait your dog during long duration obedience build up training and you will get the 1.5 hour long down you need!

Using too much food creates over stimulation in prey behavior.  Timing the bait feed improperly will create a sloppy unfocused dog that abandons his position.  To learn more about prey drive and training dogs with food bait and luring visit my blog.

Join me next week as we explore Bait Training Rules of Success!