FF165: A Star Puppy: Using Control Unleashed and Free Work to Raise a Confident Puppy

 Teaching Your Puppy to Take A Breath

There are some skills that I find exceptionally easy to teach a puppy that become increasingly difficult to teach an adolescent, young adult, and adult dog. All that learning history and life experiences can begin to muddy our training! Fortunately for you, we’re starting the CU skill Take A Breath nice and early, when it’s most easily taught. I find that puppies naturally take deep breaths, and this can become a skill that your puppy will carry along with them for the rest of their lives!

Take A Breath is essentially as it sounds - we are teaching our puppy to take a deep breath. And it benefits our puppy just as it would benefit us: it calms the nervous system. What better time to work on calming the nervous system well before big feelings start to emerge during developmental periods like adolescence! 

It’s also a beautiful way to co-regulate. I love doing TAB with my dogs. We look at each other and we take deep breaths together. It’s bonding, relaxing, and pretty darn magical.

Before we begin, I would like you to keep in mind that we are not expecting a big, deep breath when we first teach this skill. That comes with time! For now, we just want to build the picture for our puppy. We cue them by holding a treat up to our nose and taking a deep breath. Some puppies may find this confusing! They may want to try to get the treat, or feel uncomfortable with you staring at their nose. So let’s take things nice and slow to help them be successful.

To do that, we’re going to first show them the TAB picture. 

Steps:

1. With your puppy in front of you, hold a treat up to your nose and then immediately bring the treat to their mouth. Don’t worry about a little bit of movement initially. Eventually we want to see our puppy remain relaxed and stay mostly still. We do this by very quickly bringing the food to their mouth. Repeat this until you see a confident puppy that trusts that the food will be brought to them.
2. Now, hold the treat up to your nose, take a breath, and then immediately feed your puppy. If your puppy finds this weird and reacts to your intake in breath, just make a more shallow breath next rep. Repeat until you see that confidence in the picture once more.
3. Start to add duration with the treat at your nose in a way that keeps your puppy successful. They likely haven’t had much exposure to the concept of duration, so we want to shape this very slowly. Your goal is to reach about 3 seconds of holding the treat to your nose and taking a breath before feeding your puppy, all while your puppy remains calm and stationary.

If you find that a bed or cot helps to keep your puppy in place, please feel free to use those! 

Now that our puppy understands the TAB picture, we’re going to begin to actually feed for breaths. Once again, remember that this is not about deep breaths yet, we’re simply feeding for any breath we get. 

How do we know when our puppy takes a breath? It’s really going to depend on the individual puppy. Admittedly, these days I’m constantly analyzing dogs’ noses! I’m always on the lookout for a “good TAB nose” : ) You don’t have to be quite as devoted as I am, but there are certainly some tips I can provide you to help you gain an understanding of what to look for:

• My favorite TAB nose is a big poof of the nostrils. This is what I most commonly see, especially in our retrievers and other larger-nosed breeds. We’re basically looking for any kind of expansion of the nostril.
• Second most frequent is a movement of the hair behind or surrounding the nostrils. This is especially easy to see in any terrier or doodle breed that may have coarse and longer hair around their nose.
• If you’re not seeing movement around the nose, you may see a poof of your puppy’s cheeks. My long-muzzled Collies do this one when they’re nice and relaxed!
• If you’re convinced that your puppy simply doesn’t breathe (I promise you, they do!), then try looking at their chest or ribcage for expansion. You can even place your hand on their side and feel for this if they’re comfortable with that.

The best thing you can do is observe your puppy while they are resting or sleeping. This way, there’s no food or setup required that may keep them from taking deep breaths. Just a cute, tired puppy…and you staring at their nose : )

Steps:

1. Begin by reviewing your “first steps to TAB” a few times to ensure your puppy is ready.
2. Start to “shop for breath.” If you see your puppy breathe, immediately give them a treat. If you do not see them breathe within about three seconds, give them a treat anyways.
3. Don’t worry about catching every breath; if you feed for a breath, great! If you miss it, no big deal. We want to keep feeding our puppy for hanging out and being calm because if they begin to become frustrated by a delay in reinforcement, we will be less likely to find breaths.
4. Continue this over time. You can start to shape for deeper breaths, though I find that as the puppy begins to understand this game, the deeper breaths just naturally come. 

A few additional tips:

• I do not mark for this behavior. It becomes too tricky with timing, and the marker can also add some arousal. You’ll find that just the movement of your hand with the treat toward your puppy’s mouth indicates what they are being fed for.
• If you’re really having trouble seeing your puppy breath despite building calm duration while you hold the treat up, you can try gently blowing on the treat to watch for your puppy to air scent. Only do this if your puppy is comfortable with it, some puppies may find it bothersome.
• You can also videotape the session and then watch the video back in slow motion. Often you’ll catch movement that you don’t catch in real time.
• The deeper a breath you take, the more likely your puppy will mimic you. That’s in fact why we’re taking a deep breath! We’re looking for our puppy to see us breathing and then do the same. If you have trouble relaxing and taking a deep breath and feel as though you’re “faking it”, try practicing some deep breathing on your own. I think you’ll find it to be just as beneficial for you as it is for your puppy!
• Over time we can add a cue. I just take a deep breath and that cues my dog to do the same. I also have no problem holding the treat up to my nose and using that as the cue. But you can certainly add a verbal cue if you’d like. You’d do this just as you would add any verbal cue - wait until the behavior is fluent, and then introduce your new verbal cue right before your old cue of holding the treat to your nose and taking a breath.

This behavior turns into a wonderful co-regulating activity. I use it to calm my puppy and also to check on my puppy’s feelings. Their breath can give you a lot of information! And of course, the more we can all relax and breathe, the better we will all feel. 

Have fun with this one and don’t put too much pressure on yourself to get your puppy to breathe right away! This is a skill that will last a lifetime and I hope you can enjoy the process of learning it together with your puppy : )