We’re here in a brand new environment with Magnus the Service Dog Great Dane puppy in training. He’s never been on this side of the park before, this is also his first time coming out of the car so I’m wondering how he’s going to handle it.

It’s important to take time with your dog so if they do need help it’s okay. If you can lift up a large dog like Magnus so for him I’ll just pick him up and put him down.

I’m not gonna start asking for behaviors right away because he needs to adjust and see what’s going on. Now you’ll also notice that I have his harness on here which is a signal to him that it’s not official Service Dog training time. I train my dogs with a harness and a collar. I use a very large loose martingale collar to signal that it’s training time and right now I just want him to absorb, get into the environment and that’s why I have his harness on.

I’m just waiting for the right behavior to happen to reinforce. This is his breakfast, kibble in my pouch right here and I’m just waiting for that eye contact now. I

just want to reinforce when he starts to look at me, and he is. His focus is actually coming in pretty good. I’m surprised at how well and how quick this is happening and I’m choosing a very low distraction environment.

You can see across the park over there there’s a lot of cars, there’s a lot of people, there’s dogs, there’s bikes too. So I want to introduce that slowly. I just want to introduce that slowly but I am really surprised that he’s doing so well in this environment.

So we’re going to look at doing a little bit of loose leash walking warm up. So you can see once we started moving his attention started to wane a little bit, he’s hearing some people over here and I’m just waiting for him to offer behavior it’s just a lot of patience when you’re working with any dog, young puppy especially.

He’s not in a perfect loose leash walk, which again my criteria right now isn’t super high. Across the way we’ve got some people with their bikes. He’s really keying in on

those people over there so we’re gonna stop and we’re gonna take a minute to just let him remember what he’s supposed to do, which is look at me and not at the distractions over there. He’s popping in really good. I want to go horizontal back here back and forth because I don’t want to keep getting closer, I want to make sure that he’s okay in the general area first.

I’m not gonna call his name. a little wait for that good enough you didn’t look at me but he started going back into that heel position. I’m not keeping this super tight, that is not my goal. I’m not gonna get frustrated, this a puppy, this is a fun time, this is the best thing in the world to be doing because you are spending time with your dog and you gotta learn more about them as you go. If they’re more distracted by at what level he was really confused at that what he’s like wait a minute what’s going on  he looked at a car, looks back at me, that’s all I’m looking for.