Reply To: Mary & Salu

[Alana McGee]

Ah ha- you said something perfect that we can pick out and reference “I’ve tried clicking right after the nose touch “

You;re going to have to preempt the nose touch. To you it will seem like you are clicking in anticipation (and you are).

Dogs are much faster than humans so if you aim to click before he nose touches (which means it will really happen likely RIGHT as his nose is doing it) that’s what you want. Clicking too late or “after” when either his face is pulling away (or his lips are starting to cover it/ lick it) is not what we want! Most Dogs associate the click with the exact moment it happens. If his tongue is out when the click happens, he may think “oh she wants me to blow raspberries”

Do you practice nose targeting/ touching with him in other arenas? We suggest you do that. If you want for a video this week to send us some of that, we can help you through it. You can use anything- a post it, those hard yogurt lids are great. Practice having him touch it and you clicking. You can select for certain criteria such as a closed mouth, harder targeting, double tapping, etc. Start by having him target aka nose touch your palm. Hold your hand vertically for this and have him boop it with his nose. You can then switch from hand to hand. hand targeting is a great foundation game for many things.

Let’s build up his reward history for nose touching objects. It may help the truffle just become another “object” and not temptation

You certainly can work on and ask for more of the paw, but nose touching is so helpful later, we’d encourage you to stick with it for a bit and we can help you through the process.