Intro
If there is one skill set that translates across every aspect of life for our dogs, heel work is one of them. Whether you are walking around town, chilling at a backyard barbeque, or heading to the blind, having a dog that knows how to properly heel and remain at heel is an absolute joy. In this series we will explore the importance of heel work for your dog and how to go about ingraining this behavior and keeping it sharp throughout your dog’s life.
Introducing Heel
At this point in your dog’s training, it should already be introduced to either a clicker or some other vocal marker. We are going to use the clicker paired with treats to help shape the desired behavior we want to see from our pup. The first step in doing this involves working at short distances and getting your pup’s attention as you walk away from it. Once your dog finds itself with its head in line with your knee, click and treat.
We continue using this same process until we feel the dog is starting to understand what it is we are looking for. Once this is accomplished we begin work on trying to get the puppy to take a step in sync with our own. We are not worried about the number of steps, in other words the duration that your dog can walk beside you, but instead on your dog simply moving with you.
Shaped behaviors
As soon as our dog has a basic understanding of what it is supposed to be doing, we need to begin to give the dog more context into how the desired skill is to be performed. In this case, we want our dog to remain by our side and not drift away from us as we are walking forward. To help mold this behavior of staying tight to our side, it helps to use a natural linear object (wall, tall grass, edge of a sidewalk, etc.) to exert spatial pressure on our dog and keep them in the proper position.
As our dog progresses with the basics we can slowly start asking more of it and add the vocal cue, “Heel”. First we will ask the dog to take only a few steps and then give him a reward. Next we add a sit at the end of every three or four steps. Finally, we can ask the dog to heel for the length of the object that is serving as a barrier. Keeping this short and rewarding often is paramount to your dog’s success, so nothing over 15 - 20 yards yet.
Reverse, reverse
Now that we have figured out how to keep our dog in the heel position moving forward we can start adding other directions into the mix. Reverse heel will be important when we begin the next phase of training, so an early introduction to this can be helpful. Often dogs struggle with reverse heel as it is more unnatural, at least if you are asking the dog to walk backwards. It is much easier to teach a dog to walk normally as you walk backwards, i.e. the dog is walking forwards to keep up with you as you go backwards. There is no major difference between the two methods, so it simply comes down to which version is more aesthetically pleasing to you the handler. But whichever you choose, stay consistent with what you are asking to avoid any confusion on the dog’s part.
Recap
Heel work may seem very boring to some, but it is an integral part to having an obedient dog who understands teamwork. We begin laying the groundwork to heel by introducing the concept with a clicker and treats, then transitioning to asking the dog to move with us, to finally introducing more contextual interference (reverse heel, duration, barriers, etc.) to help solidify the behavior. Stay tuned for Part II where we will cover more advanced heel work to increase your dog’s fluency of this skill.
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