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Hand Touch Issue


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Recently we started agility, which has been a blast! Pretty much the first thing we were told to work on was building the value of my hands and work on hand touches. It's been going pretty well, however I am having a hard time getting one of my dogs to do harder hand touches (say a higher placed hand) because he has been doing "high fives" and "shakes" for so long with an outreached hand that he gets confused and gives me a paw instead. When he does this I say "use your nose" and he will touch with his nose instead.... Has anyone else had this problem?

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I don't do agility but my suggestion is to offer a closed fist. Make it look different to him, even put a treat in your fist to lure his nose to your hand at first. Once he is touching his nose to your fist, start opening your hand until he is touching your open hand.

 

Should not take long. Especially if the dog knows how to offer behaviors already. When I try to get new behaviors/instead of an auto pilot offering, I just stay quiet and let them figure it out. A closed fist offered close to his nose should get him started on not offering a paw and quickly move to no paw offerings. I have also found it helpful to click/treat at first for not offering the "auto" response. A lot of times i will start a session by clicking for doing nothing if the dog is just offering up a bunch of behaviors. I will ask for something so simple like a sit and click for just a sit. Then I can get their brain into thinking mode more and not just automatically offering known behaviors.

Good luck!

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I don't do agility but my suggestion is to offer a closed fist. Make it look different to him, even put a treat in your fist to lure his nose to your hand at first. Once he is touching his nose to your fist, start opening your hand until he is touching your open hand.

 

Should not take long. Especially if the dog knows how to offer behaviors already. When I try to get new behaviors/instead of an auto pilot offering, I just stay quiet and let them figure it out. A closed fist offered close to his nose should get him started on not offering a paw and quickly move to no paw offerings. I have also found it helpful to click/treat at first for not offering the "auto" response. A lot of times i will start a session by clicking for doing nothing if the dog is just offering up a bunch of behaviors. I will ask for something so simple like a sit and click for just a sit. Then I can get their brain into thinking mode more and not just automatically offering known behaviors.

Good luck!

Thank you! We haven't done a lot of shaping so he isn't very used to offering new behaviors without a lure. We recently started doing a little of that but these tips will be really helpful.

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If he is not used to offering new behaviors, then I would click the moment his nose shows interest in your fist with the treat inside. So if I presented my fist with a smelly treat in it and his paws were on the ground and he just barely lifted his nose in the direction of your hand, I would click/treat (a treat different than the one from your fist). In a matter of minutes he should catch on that his nose going near the hand gets the click, not the paw. Even if he is pawing your fist at first, just try again. Present fist, wait, and the second his paws are on the ground, click. Proceed from there.

 

Let us know how it goes. Sometimes we have to get creative to problem solve!

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Is it possible you're asking for too much too soon?

 

If he understands the hand touch at nose level, you might try just incrementally moving your hand just a teeny bit away -- either further away or raised -- instead of more pronounced differences.

 

If he understands "use your nose" it sounds like he's not quite understanding what you're asking of him. Perhaps the positions of your hands are very close to what they are when you're asking for high fives and shakes. These dogs can be aware of incredibly subtle differences in body language and tone of voice, which was really driven home to me when I was trying to teach children in our reading program how to get Bodhi to hold a treat on his nose and catch it.

 

You might also try combining the cues "touch" (or whatever you use) with "use your nose" to see if you can eliminate the confusion. IOW, try saying "touch with your nose" and see if that makes sense to him. Since it does in the other context, it just might, giving you the opportunity to proof the behavior and later dropping the longer cue.

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My dogs will sometimes get confused between nose touches and paw touches to targets, especially when I use my hands but this can happen with target objects, as well. When one of them offers a nose touch instead of a paw, or a paw instead of a nose, I just wait and let the dog work it out.

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This may not work for you, but I use the following:

 

1) My palm up means "shake" or in our case, "gimme paw!" (with that verbal)

 

2) My palm down means hit it with your nose (for one dog, it's "hit it!." For the other, well, he doesn't do it!)

 

I use it as part of my warmup routine - focuses the dog on me, and keeps her eyes off other dogs!

 

diane

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Thank you everyone for your replies! It is SO helpful to get feedback and ideas from everyone. This gave me a ton of new tricks to work with to improve his hand touch. Regardless of the difficulties of a stationary hand touch, he has no problem understanding following my hand due to the practice... Which is kind of the whole point!

 

So I don't know how much I should worry about the minute details since he is being expected to tell the difference without a cue (which seems hard for a dog that has spent nearly 2 years seeing a hand as a very highly rewarded high five or shake-like most dogs these are his favorite "tricks").

 

I'm thinking I might just avoid doing the stationary hand touch In those positions to avoid confusing him since he follows it fine while running the obstacles... Does this sound like an okay option? I could still teach him the cue with his nose but I believe that I would always need the word if it's in the same spot. Does this makes sense? Thanks in advance!

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