You might think that I only train delivery to hand considering how many of my blog spots focuses on that behavior.
Well, I obviously train a lot of different things, but I put a lot of effort into the training of delivery to hand. So here’s a short film about delivery to hand at a very early stage in the training.
But the fact is that delivery to hand is very important, and I want to teach the puppy that behavior as soon as possible. As I teach her everything by playing it is a bit difficult if not the deliveries to hand works very early.
Elsa’s and my definition of delivery to hand is not just that second when the dog presses the object in our hand, instead the behavior starts when the dog grabs the object and then turns around and runs straight back to us. The last thing that happens in the sequence is that the dog puts the object in our hand. In our book there is a whole chapter about delivery to hand and there we describe how you can handle different challenges and how you can vary the distractions.
The key to success is how you train distractions – that is, if you want a reliable behavior that works at all times – that we can’t emphasize enough. (And in the book distractions are discussed in almost every chapter: holding an object with distractions, deliveries to hand with distractions, and so on.)
The film shows when I train delivery to hand with distractions in a very early stage. We try to distract the puppy with toys, tidbits, and noise. And when I say, “try to distract” I don’t mean that we are trying to get her to fail, but rather the opposite; we plan the distractions so that they are on a level that we believe that she can handle. She should succeed as many times as possible so that she gets a lot of experiences of the fact that it pays off to ignore the distractions.
