Want a simple game that will increase your dog’s attention to you, calm their excitement, and be a foundation for deeper communication? The Up and Down Game is the trick!
My pandemic “silver lining” was being able to do a deep dive into the concepts of a training system known as Control Unleashed. At its heart, this teaches dogs to “converse” with you about things that concern them – a quiet, calm reporting on trigger items in place of big over-reactions like barking and lunging, or panicking and running. Even if you don’t have a reactive dog, you and your dog will benefit greatly from this foundational skill! It’s an exercise that I am teaching pretty much every dog I work with now. I first learned it as “Find It/Find Me”, and in the Control Unleashed world it’s called “the Up And Down Game”. It’s easy, and its reach is so powerful that some pet owners have called it “life-changing”!
Find it/Find me
This exercise sets up Fido to get rewarded for voluntarily checking in with you. Eventually you can use this to encourage your dog to look briefly and calmly at distractions or triggers, but with the expectation that she’ll turn back to us as well.
It works like this: You drop a treat at your feet and let your dog eat it; when he looks up, you say yes or click your clicker to capture or mark that moment, and drop the next treat, setting him up to repeat. The dog looks up and the treat goes down – hence, the Up And Down game.
Some hints or notes:
- Your dog does not have to be sitting or doing anything else to start with (the first treat you drop on the ground is a freebie, but it acts as a minor distraction).
- Your dog doesn’t have to make eye contact, she just has to orient towards you, and give enough attention to you that she would notice a hand gesture or verbal signal (command).
- For this game, you don’t call your dog’s name or otherwise cue your dog to “look” – you just build up the frequency at which she will check in with you.
Once he’s smoothly eating the first treat and looking back up at you in expectation of the marker and the next treat, you can start varying where the “down” treat goes – you can drop it slightly off to one side, then on the next repeat, to the other (ping-pong pattern). Or you can toss it slightly behind the dog, or slightly behind you (yo-yo pattern). You can even place a treat down and start moving yourself one or two steps to the side or away from the dog, or tossing it one location then moving back to a chair or mat that you started from.
Here’s a series of me demonstrating (and practicing) Find It/Find Me (and the related Whiplash Turn) with my own dog, Fletcher:
- In the bedroom, with low distractions: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CLa9tLzB4Mi/
- By the front door, with no distractions and no leash: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CLu8mNJB5cI/
- By the front door, with a leash and the door open: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CLu8mNJB5cI/
- In our front walkway: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLvKEKfhztH/
- In the driveway – and with a very barky dog who happened to come by! – https://www.instagram.com/tv/CLvBTNjB9lm/
- Same driveway, with a second, much quieter dog on the other side of the street: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CLvDZ2rBk53/
Note that if he were not this successful in any of the earlier stages, I would keep repeating the practice at that level of challenge until we could move on. But doing this exercise gives me insight into how distracted or worried my dog is – it’s a way of taking a measurement. For example, you can see how difficult this simple exercise is for Lemon as soon as she gets out of the car, and for Kogan when a strange man shows up.
Focused attention on a walk
I recommend that you do a similar progression, with situations like these:
- The place you normally train
- A few repetitions in each room of your house
- A few repetitions in your backyard (if you have one!)
- A few by your front door
- A few with the front door open. Have your dog on a leash, for safety. If your dog is too excited by the promise of a leash and the front door open, do this immediately upon returning from a walk
- In your car
- Immediately after your dog gets out of the car
- In random places on your walk, when your dog is not distracted
- In random places on your walk, when your dog is slightly distracted
- On a hiking trail
- At some distance from your dog’s trigger
- Closer to your dog’s trigger (don’t make them get closer to, or linger in the presence of, their trigger for longer than their comfortable with!)
Here are some videos of me doing this game with a client-dog, Cassie, to get her to focus on me in a new location: https://www.instagram.com/p/CHvSsB2JOnL/
And then as soon as she gets out of the car: https://www.instagram.com/p/CHwza0thfax/ and https://www.instagram.com/p/CHw0HDtB9MS/
You can use this to present a familiar, easy, highly-rewarded behavior pattern which can become fairly fluent pretty easily. It has a few advantages in the presence of a trigger:
- It allows you to have a high rate of reinforcement
- It moves the dog from an emotional mindset to more of a thinking mindset
- It moves the dog from negative emotions of frustration, fear, or discomfort to (hopefully) pleasure and fun
- It allows you to “test” or evaluate where your dog is at, mentally. How much can she focus on you and the game, and how much does she have to focus on the trigger? (Check out how distracted Cassie is in the first video out of the car, above, compared to the second!) If your dog cannot focus on you (or even eat food), it’s a “canary in the coal mine” indication that your dog is not ready to deal with triggers.
- You can connect it to environmental “cues”, so that it becomes the default for the dog to look at you, and perhaps request a round of this “game”, in the presence of certain situations – such as when another dog appears (see https://youtu.be/oe-BuT8L91Y)
This exercise is the heart of the “Control Unleashed” program, developed by Leslie McDevitt. This simple game can be used to build better focus, better recalls, cooperative care, grooming, and husbandry, and – best of all – better communication about things that your dog feels are important! For more information, I highly recommend the book Control Unleashed: Reactive to Relaxed, by Leslie McDevitt. The earlier version, Control Unleashed: Creating a Focused and Confident Dog, was written specifically for people who want to compete in agility, but anyone with this sort of dog would benefit from the exercises so clearly described in this book.
Homework assignment: Post at least three videos of you doing this exercise with your dog! They can be less than 30 seconds long, as long as it contains a few repetitions – the goal is to see a smooth pattern and some indication that the dog wants knows to look back at you (remember, it doesn’t have to be eye-contact, just focusing on you/your body over anything else in the environment)!
“First, the dog has to know there is a system.
And then the dog has to know that he can operate the system”
– Leslie McDevitt
