Train Your Dog to GO TO and STAY on Any Bed

I wanted to talk to you today about teaching your dog to go to a mat and stay there.

The goal is we can send the dog from a distance to the bed and then they'll stay there until released.

So I have Tina. Tina is a rescued pit bull and we practiced this a tiny bit. So she's going to move a little quicker than most dogs, but that'll give me a chance to show you the steps a little bit. So we don't need to use a clicker for this behavior because it's not super precise.

I'm going to use the yes reward marker instead, which you'll see.

So we begin choosing a mat. This is her regular bed, which is fine if we want to have it, so you can travel with it. You might want to choose something like a foam bath mat or like more of a flat dog bed that won't slide around. And then you can take that out to restaurants or to a friend's house. That can be really handy because the dog will know, oh, this is what I do.

You can also use a tether with this behavior if it's not ready to be used, say, at a friend's house. But it'll still help the dog understand faster and not be so frustrated.

So first we start with luring the dog to the bed, adding our cue, go to bed, good girl. And then I'm going to Lure, sit and down, good girl free!

So free is our release cue. And actually there's an optional piece here. You can add a stay. So it can either be go to bed, and go to bed means stay there as part of the queue, or you can say go to bed, stay.

And then in either case, you do your release word at the end, free. So I'll show you with the stay version that's sometimes easier for people to remember. Go to bed, stay. And when I say stay, I'm going to stay with her at first, feeding little treats free.

So that would have looked the same had I had said stay or not, depending on how I wanted to do it. So whether you have the automatic built in stay, when you say go to bed, it means a stay, or you say the stay free. Good girl.

So there's a few different factors, right? There's getting the dog to the bed. There's the stay on the bed. So we can work on the distance that you can get her to the bed from. So when I'm starting that, I say, go to bed, and then I'll help go with her if she needs me.

But I want to hang back and see if she remembers stay. I'm going to keep lowering a down because that's my preference. Here's free.

And so eventually I want to be able to just point to the bed. Say, go to bed. She'll go from a distance. We have to build up to that. Free. Come on.

But she kind of knows it a little bit. Go to bed. Good girl. Yes, good girl. Stay. And then when the dog is ready, and this would be going too fast for most dogs, you can take a couple of steps back or actually start with just half a step like this, come back to feed free.

You're all done. You stay free. And so we're building up the distance we can send her from the length of time she can stay. And then distractions like me being at a distance, we can practice with other distractions, like there's a piece of food on the floor, there's a toy on the floor.

And so when you're done practicing, you can put the bed up, or you could also leave it down and reward your dog every time she lays down there by herself, that will start to get that she'll really love going to bed, that behavior.

So troubleshooting. It's possible if your dog's uncomfortable with the bed itself, it might be, oh, I don't want to step on that. And then you want to go extra slow. Reward for one paw on, two paws on.

And then if your dog is getting up when you step back, make it really easy. So you're just going to do all a little bit back and then feed until they get the idea if they already have a stay, they'll get it faster. Okay, guys, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoy the video and have fun training your dog. Bye.