Videos below! On Monday I went to get the oil changed in our van. Our dealership gives us a coupon for a $10 oil change every month or so, and we are getting ready to go on a trip soon, so it was time. It turns out when I got there that our tires needed to be aligned, too. Luckily they gave us a disability discount of about $15 off on the alignment, too. We try to get that discount when we can, because we need to try to offset all the disability taxes in life (all the extra money you have to spend because of your disability)!
I had to wait there while the oil was changed and the tires were aligned. I brought my wheelchair so I would be sure to be comfortable no matter where I ended up sitting. I decided to work on Felix’s down stay while I was there.
At first I put Felix in his down and he kept popping up after a short while. I realized it had been a while since I’d worked on it, so I broke out the treats and started intermittently rewarding him for his down stay. At first I started out giving a treat about every minute, but soon it was every 5 minutes, then every 10 minutes or so. He was very happy to do his down stay with a reward about every 10–15 minutes. It made me realize I should explain to you all how to train an extended down-stay in a dog that really gets bored easily and wants to go exploring and make up their own fun.
I started out doing down stays next to me for seconds at a time. A random reward schedule is really important for this, as you don’t want your dog to be able to predict when you’re going to give them the reward.
So for example, I’d start out by giving a reward for a down stay after 1 second, then 3 seconds, then 2 seconds, then 3 seconds, then 1 second, etc. So randomly between 1–3 seconds.
Once he was able to reliably do this without breaking his down (and by the way, I do allow my dog to get up and readjust so long as they stay on their mat), I increased the random reward intervals to between 1 and 5 seconds. Then between 1 and 10 seconds. Then 3 and 15 seconds. It took many weeks of training to gradually increase these reward rates.
If Felix broke his down and got up to go investigate something, I would redirect him back to the mat and start timing all over again. If he broke his down more than 2 or 3 times in a training session, it meant that either I was doing too long of intervals, or he was done with the training for that day. If we had just started training that day, I’d reduce the intervals. If we’d been somewhere for 15 minutes already or more, then I’d just realize he’d had enough for today and we’d leave.
When I was doing short amounts of time, I could count in my head the amounts of time between rewards. But it was the only thing I could focus on. I couldn’t do it while having a cup of coffee with a friend or something, because I had to constantly be counting.
So when we got up to about 20 seconds, I brought out my phone timer. I used the stopwatch feature, and hit the lap button to reset every time I gave him a treat. This gave me a record of how long each stay was during my training session. And it enabled me to do other things besides count. Right after giving the treat, I’d decide what my next interval would be. So I’d give a treat and then immediately tell myself “I’ll do 25 seconds now”. Then hit the lap button on my cell phone and talk to my friend for 25 seconds.
It turns out to be a really unobtrusive way to train, using my cell phone like this!
At first when you’re doing this sort of training, you have to increase slowly, like seconds at a time. But as you progress, the intervals can get larger. So, for example, I would do between 30 seconds and a minute and a half as intervals. Then the next step up I’d do between 1–5 minutes. Then between 3–10 minutes etc. Each time if there were more than 2–3 failures, I’d reassess if I had gone up too quickly or if we needed to leave for the day. You also need to make it easier if there are more distractions or a new environment.
Felix still struggles with long down stays, especially if he hasn’t had a nice good long walk beforehand, or been working in a store or something beforehand. And that was the case at the oil change place. He’d had a walk that morning, but it was now the afternoon and he hadn’t done anything all day. So needing a treat every 10–15 minutes was really not too surprising.
By giving him that reward every 10–15 minutes, I used up about a quarter of a stick of string cheese, and he was able to do an amazing job of staying despite lots of distractions! Here are some videos of the distractions he encountered while at the oil change place.
The first video shows someone vacuuming across the aisle from us.
This next video shows how he maintains his stay while a woman walks by, and waits for me to give him permission to greet her. Greeting people is a big reward for Felix, so sometimes it’s good to use that instead of a piece of cheese for a long down stay!
The third video shows him maintaining his down while a large trash can on wheels was rolled across the tile floor in front of him. It is a “trashy” video LOL!
And this last video shows just a few of the people who walked by him while he was lying there next to the walkway. Several people walked by, and one guy who worked there kept going back and forth a LOT!