We’re gonna let him look and absorb and we’re not gonna start moving right away. Instead I’m just going to start marking and reinforcing when he offers the right behavior to me. This is a new environment, I am using my clicker rather than my voice, I also like to use the word nice and I say it in a very specific tone to let him know we’re training.

Now the other thing here’s what I really watch out for is the blacktop. When you’re out training your service dog puppy, especially since it’s summertime, this blacktop can get pretty hot. So it’s actually pretty cool from what I can tell it’s not getting any hotter, so this is a safe environment for him to be on. So we’re just gonna practice his loose leash walking, this is not our formal loose leash walking, he has his harness on and we’re just gonna warm up here. 

We were practicing at the park earlier today to get all the sniffs out and it’s really important before you do sessions like this for training a Service Dog that your dog has a really tired sniffer.

So you can tell he’s doing pretty well with distractions over here but I want to amp it up a little bit. We’ve got some people coming by so this is actually a lot better than what he has been in the past you can see how much of a big step we’ve gotten since the last time we filmed with him because we weren’t even passing people before and now you can see just how close they’re coming by. He’s doing real good, he’s not walking on my right side anymore and we’re just gonna go a little bit closer to this dog park over here because I want to start amping up some of the distractions and see how he performs.

 

Now you might have seen that he didn’t respond to that clicker you also will notice that we are much closer to all these distractions, so that is very valuable feedback. 

I want  him to watch the dogs play from a distance, focus back on me, and again this is a brand new environment that he’s never experienced before. You are watching this real-time, first time, how to respond and how to build up distractions with a young puppy. I gotta tell you guys like if you do it right from the start it’s easy, anybody can do this.