Drop It Without the Drama

I want to talk about a command or behavior that I think is really important.

And I'm going to kind of walk you through how to teach it.

And of course, I have a video on our YouTube page.

So you can always go there as well.

And I posted one from a fellow trainer colleague that His technique of this behavior was a little different than the way I do it, but I thought it was really interesting and I thought it was a really good option to help teach this.

I want to talk about teaching your dog to release something from his mouth or drop something from his mouth.

Now, I know that most people focus on teaching a dog leave it commands.

And leave it commands are typically taught to dogs that either leave your mouth off of it completely, don't even bother putting your mouth on it, or it is... drop it and leave it alone, right? So it can be very confusing to dogs with the use of leave it.

The other problem with leave it is that people don't teach it correctly.

Therefore, they end up escalating the request for leave it where they get really fast and repeat it a hundred times you know leave it leave it leave it leave it leave it all right that is typically kind of the thing that people do and what that really does a lot of times just makes the dog eat it faster because of your energy so leave it to me can be useful I think that it is a useful command and behavior However, I don't think it's the one you should go to to help your dog leave things alone.

And I say that because I believe that most people struggle getting their dog or even communicating to their dog to leave something alone before the dog gets it in their mouth.

Now, If they practice leave it and taught leave it to where the item is never in their mouth, and then the dog gets it in their mouth and they're asking leave it, that's going to be confusing to the dog.

The dog's going to have a hard time generalizing that.

Now, if you teach it with things in their mouth and your leave it is like a drop it or a release, then you're good to go.

But I think it's important that we teach a dog how to drop things out of their mouth, how to release something out of their mouth immediately.

That way, you know, you don't see your dog grab something so you didn't have time to say leave it.

They already have it in their mouth.

We don't want them swallowing it.

So we need to put in a really good command and behavior of dropping or releasing.

So many of...

I would say a lot of the clients that I work with, they've already kind of started teaching that and they will use release and drop it.

Those are the two ones that they really kind of focus on.

Again, leave it there.

But most don't teach leave it correctly and it falls apart in the real world.

I personally teach an automatic leave it, where I want my dog just to learn to leave things alone on the ground, mostly like trash, things that you would see on a regular basis.