Go To Your Mat
Go To Your Mat is a wonderful skill for your dog to have. Imagine your dog lying quietly on his mat while your family has dinner or when you have guests in your home. Sound good? Let's get started!
Go Mat
As before, work in ten or twenty cookie increments. This will encourage your to work in small bouts so that you can take frequent stops and evaluate your progress.
To begin, sit in a chair (or you can stand) and toss a cookie behind your dog. C/T for returning in your direction,. Do this until your dog gobbles up his cookie and races back toward you.
Next, place a mat or bed on the ground where you were rewarding your dog for his return. Your criteria will progress as follows:
1. C/T for one foot on the mat
2. C/T for two feet on the mat
3. C/T for three feet on the mat
4. C/T for all four feet on the mat
5. C/T for four feet on the mat when you toss the cookie to each side and in front of the dog
6. C/T for finding the mat from 20 to 30 feet away
7. C/T for all four feet on the mat and your dog staying on the mat for one or two seconds
It should look like this
Once your dog is very motivated to race to his mat, it is time to introduce the down. To do this, click him for four feet on the mat and deliver his cookies between his front feet. This should encourage him to bow down to eat the cookie. When he does, mark that and continue to feed between his front feet until he drops all the way. Stay at this stage until he hits the mat and drops immediately.
Alternately, you can cue him to down when he gets to the mat. If you choose to do this, cue him four or five times, then wait him out a bit and see if he offers the drop or a small part of it. Delay your down cue and he should begin to offer the down on his own.
Once your dog races to the mat and immediately drops on it, begin tossing his cookies behind him and to the sides again.
When he is fluent at this stage, it is time to add the cue. To add the cue, say Go Mat right after he eats his cookie.
To build duration on the mat, put your clicker away. Now when your dog goes to his mat, say Yes and give him five cookies in a row for lying on the mat, then say OK! and move away from the mat. OK is his realease. This skill should have an on switch (Go Mat) and an off switch (OK) so that your dog understands to remain on his mat until released.
Here are the steps to build a stay on the mat:
1. Feed him five cookies quickly while he is on the mat and release (OK)
2. Make him wait longer and longer between cookies for a total of 10 seconds to a minute *
3. Be variable in the amount of time that passes between cookies
4. Begin to move around while he stays on the mat
5. Take his toys out while he is on the mat
6. Bring food out while he is on the mat
7. Toss his food and toys to the ground while he is on his mat
8. Increase the difficulty
9. Begin to increase the amount of time on the mat to an hour or more. To do this, keep
rewarding at unpredictable intervals
10. Begin to add distance.
* If your dog gets off his mat before released, it indicates that you are asking too much of him. Lower your criteria and feed more often. If you are adding distractions or distance, you can lower these criteria instead of feeding more often. When your dog gets off his bed, simply recue him and start over. Once you get to step 8 or 9 however, you MUST NOT recue him any longer. To understand this, read the article on Cues.
Cues function as conditioned reinforcers for our dogs. They predict the opportunty to earn food. If your dog moves from his mat before he is released, and you recue him, you are actually rewarding him for leaving the mat. It looks like this: dog leaves mat, owner tells him Go Mat, dog goes to the mat, dog gets cookies. The cookie at the end of this behaviour chain will reinforce everything that happened before it, so you have rewarded leaving the mat! You need to do this in the early stages to get your dog back on the mat, but you shouldn't have to for very long. If your dog leaves his mat and say 'whoops' and stop giving him cookies, he should find his way back to the mat himself because he knows that is where he earns reinforcement. You can then resume training. Soon your dog will notice that cookies happen on the mat and don't happen off the mat, and he will remain on the mat reliably until released. The key is to increase your criteria slowly so that you don't set him up to fail.
For more information, see the article on building duration.