OB140: From Pivots to Practical Heeling

Teaching a Nose Touch and Adding Duration

Nose touches can be so useful for a variety of behaviors.  It’s one of the first things I teach to my puppies.  It can be used as a target behavior for recalls, and we often use it in a reward chain for heeling.  When it’s transferred to a physical target, you can use it for go outs, contacts, and so much more!

In this class, we will focus on using it for heeling.  We will be teaching a sustained nose touch to assist with teaching tuck sits in heel and teaching head position. We will also use it throughout heeling to encourage upward attention.

Nose Touch to Palm

I start by teaching my dog to touch his nose to my palm.  With treats in one hand, I present the other empty hand (with a flat palm) a couple of inches from my dog’s nose.  I am careful to keep my hand still and not bop the dog on the nose - he should be doing the touching!  Most dogs will reach out and sniff your hand, and as soon as you feel the contact mark and reward.  I frequently switch hands at this stage.  If the dog doesn’t touch the hand, I try to get him moving.

Adding Duration

As my dog starts to understand hand touches, I will start to only reward the ones that are harder.  I very systematically do this; I don’t just stop rewarding the soft ones, but I try to gradually shape the dog to punch my hand harder. 

Typically if you withhold the click, the dog will touch with more pressure.  As I start to think about adding duration, I will start withholding the click until the second nose touch.  What ends up happening is the dog hits your hand harder, and therefore a little longer.  After a few reps, I will start to click every third touch.  Typically around this time the dog gives you a longer nose touch.  At that point I start to very incrementally add duration by delaying the click a millisecond at a time.  When you first start adding duration, you must split it into fractions of seconds, but as the dog starts to understand, you will be able to add seconds at a time instead of 10th of seconds.  Be sure that you are ping-ponging the time, to make it easier in between the harder reps.

There are other tricks you can use to help the dog understand duration.  Sometimes if you pull your hand away slightly the dog will push harder to get to your hand, and therefore longer, and you can click that.  I like to teach my dogs to maintain contact with my hand as I move it around because that will come in handy later.  If your dog is struggling, try to play with them a little bit to get the arousal level up.  That will often cause the dog to touch harder.  If the dog comes off my hand before I click, I just wait and click when they touch it again, then slowly work the duration back up over the next few reps.