Gill's Canine Coaching

30/07/2025

Leisurely sniffy walks are the best enrichment for dogs, using all of their senses and will tire them out.

26/07/2025

Yep, that's me

24/07/2025

Join me on ABC Riverland Radio tomorrow morning (Friday) at 9.10am talking about how to keep your outside pets warm in this cold weather..

07/07/2025

Footprints in the sand, can you tell which are Giselles.

06/07/2025

A great article

What is reward placement and why is it important? 🤔 🧀

One of the ways we can help tweak training to be more effective is to think about reward placement or position. So when training for a certain behaviour where is it we are looking to build value, as that is where we will want the reward to be. If our placement is off, we may not actually be rewarding what we wanted to!

For example, if you are working on heelwork but your dog is a jumper, and has a tendency to jump upwards to get the treat in your hand rather than walking nicely next to you, you can change the reward placement from being given directly from your hand to instead to being dropped on the floor by the dog. This means the value is now lower down on the floor, so instead of jumping up to get the reward we will be focused downwards to get the next one.

Similarly, if you have a dog that is very downwards focused on walks you may want to encourage more upwards focus. So teaching them to catch treats and associating looking up with where the value will be may be better choice!

Another tip for heelwork positioning specifically is to try and reward from the hand that is on the same side as your dog so they stay in that position. If we lean across our body to reward them, our dog will start to walk further and further across us in order to get closer to where the value of the reward is (the other hand).

Some other examples of reward placement would be…

🐾 Putting food on the mat rather than giving it directly to the dog for boundary or place training. So the value is in the mat not you.

🐾 Throwing food away from yourself or visitors if your dog has a tendency to jump up at people on arrival home. So they learn to stay further away in order to get the rewards.

🐾 If a dog gets excited when visitors come over, have the owners reward the dog for being calm when someone new comes over, rather than the new person themselves, so there is less value in the visitor making them less exciting.

🐾 If teaching your dog to drop an item in a specific place, such as over a basket, reward above the basket in the position they need to be when they drop the item. This means they will make sure their head is in that position when they drop the item, rather than turning towards you to drop and missing the basket.

What are some ways you have used reward positioning to improve your training?

04/07/2025

02/07/2025

28/06/2025

26/06/2025

Did you know that dogs as well as footballers can injure their Cruciate Ligaments. Tune in to ABC Riverland radio tomorrow morning (Friday) at 9.10am to chat about it.