INTENTION CANINE

One of the first tasks that I teach a dog that comes for Service Dog training is the “Touch it.”

This is a task which begins by asking the dog to touch a specific object with her nose. This can be morphed to many different tasks, like turning on a touch light or pressing the Open door button at a business or hospital entrance.

A dog that has been trained to detect a “shift from normal” such as a blood sugar drop or an impending anxiety or panic attack, can be taught to “alert” or “interrupt” her handler using a touch command that has been transferred from an object to the handler’s body. We often swap the command “touch” to “nudge” in these cases. But, the actual word cue is irrelevant as long as it is consistently used.

Because it is such a useful behavior, we typically teach all Service Dogs in Training to perform a touch with its nose. Sometimes, a handler doesn’t actually know how such a behavior can be useful until after we’ve completed the Custom Training and they are back home with their new Service Dogs.

I also use the “touch it” as a precursor to teaching scent discrimination (nose work.) Since I want a dog to put her nose on or inside a vessel containing the target scent, I begin by simply asking her to touch this object with her nose.

Here are a few of the puppies on the day I introduced them to the “touch it” behavior. There’s no expectation for perfection, and at first I will present the object in an “hey, check this out” manner to encourage the pup to check it out -which if you are a dog usually includes getting a sniff of the thing. As the dog figures out the objective of the cue word, I limit moving it.

LYRIC

RHYME

ARTIST

RIFF

JAZZ