In my last post, I talked about teaching your dog to go to a mat as an example of something they could do instead of a behaviour you don't like. The example I used in that post was begging at the table, but settling on a mat is a great alternative behaviour for lots of other things we generally prefer that our dogs don't do. If you have a dog who jumps on guests as they come in the door, you could train your dog to lie on their mat when visitors come in. Maybe accepting takeout or package deliveries is a challenge because your dog rushes the door and tries to run out to see the person. They could lie on their mat instead. There are lots of nuisance behaviours that are impossible for our dogs to do while they are on their mats.
Aside from being an alternative to unwanted behaviours, teaching a dog to lie on a mat in the face of distractions is a great way to teach impulse control and relaxation. If you have a dog who is busy all the time and never seems to settle down, making their mat a place that they like to be helps them learn to chill out. It starts out as something that we train and ask them to do, but eventually they make the connection that the mat is a place they can go to in order to get some downtime.
What Kind of Mat Should I Use?
You can teach your dog to stay on any kind of boundary, but there are a few things that make some mats better than others. First of all, you want your mat to be big enough for your dog. If I want my mat to be a place where my dog can go to relax, I don't want it to be a place where they have to squish themselves onto and barely fit. I want my mat to be a place that my dog can lie down on comfortably.
I also want my dog to be able to tell when they are on the mat versus on the floor. If I use a thin mat like a doormat or a towel laid down on the floor, it is harder for my dog to tell whether or not their whole body is on it. They often don't even realize that they are on a mat at all when the mat is too thin because they can't feel the difference when they are on it or not on it. Something like a thick dog bed, a dog bed with a bolster around the sides or a raised cot is ideal because these are all very obviously not the floor. Again, these options are all things that my dog can lie down on comfortably.
Finally, I want my mat to make sense for the dog I have. All of my dogs like to curl up with pillows and blankets, so big squishy dog beds make sense for them. For some dogs, that option might not be ideal. Some dogs overheat more easily than others, so a raised cot that has airflow underneath it would make more sense. Some dogs will also chew and rip apart anything plush, so a raised cot would make more sense for them as well. Some raised cots will have a metal or plastic frame on the outside with canvas in the middle, so they are pretty difficult to destroy.
How to Teach It
My first goal for teaching this behaviour is to make the mat a valuable place for my dog to be. If your dog eats kibble, you can feed them their breakfast or dinner to do the training to build the value for a mat. I feed raw, so I can still use their food, but it gets a bit more complicated. What I will often do instead is use air-dried food for training and take whatever portion we use when training out of their meals later. Getting my dog to work for their meal by doing their mat training speeds the training up significantly.
To build value for the mat, I will lure them over to it with some food on their nose. When all four feet are on the mat, I will mark with "yes" to let them know that they did what I wanted them to do then start to deliver pieces of food one at a time. After several pieces of food, I will give my dog a release word (I use "okay") and then toss a piece of food away from the mat. The release word is how my dog knows that he is allowed to leave the mat. Anytime I send him to the mat, I want to make sure that I release him when I am done that training session.
Troy is going to help show you what to do in some videos. I usually try to make my training sessions last about 2-3 minutes, but I made my videos much shorter or you would get bored. To be honest, you'll probably be a bit bored anyway. Dog training in real life is not always exciting like it is on TV. You can just repeat what I am showing you until your time is up. 2-3 minutes is ideal so that your dog doesn't get tired or bored of what you are doing. You will likely also need to do several sessions of each exercise before you are ready to move on to the next one.
Eventually, my dog will start to run back to the mat on their own without me having to lure them over there with food. Once they are doing this, I can start to shape some more relaxed behaviour on the mat. Shaping is a type of training where I start to reward small pieces of a behaviour, working towards a bigger end goal.
In this case, my end goal is that Troy will go to the mat and lie down on it. What I'm starting with is him standing on the mat, so a good next step to wait for might be sitting on the mat. Instead of asking Troy to sit when he gets to the mat, I am going to wait a second to see what he does. Most dogs will sit in the absence of a reward and, when my dog does sit, I can mark that with "yes" and reward it. Once my dog is reliably sitting on the mat, I can then wait for a down before I mark and reward.
Now that the mat behaviour looks like how I want it to look - with my dog going over to the mat and getting settled - I can start to name this behaviour. Naming the behaviour is easy. Since my dog already knows what to do, I am just going to say my chosen word for going to the mat before they do it. I use the word "mat" but you can use something else if you would like. After several repetitions of this, my dog will start to associate the word with the action. I can test out whether or not my dog has learned the word yet by saying it at random points during the day. If they go to the mat, they know it. If they don't, I just need to do a few more training sessions with that word. (HINT: Stay close to the mat when you are testing this. We don't expect them to be able to find it from far away just yet.)
Next, I want to start to build some duration while my dog stays on the mat. I like to do this pretty passively, and I will often do it while I do other tasks like watching tv, working on the computer, or folding laundry. Whatever I am doing, I have some of my dog's food handy, so that I can toss them treats for remaining on their mat. Over time, I space the treats out more and more. While I work on this, I keep the mat close to where I am.
Once my dog is staying on their mat easily while I am beside them, I start to incorporate some distance so that I can send them to the mat from far away and so that they will stay there even if I move away from them. I do this in small pieces and build up to further and further away fairly slowly.
Finally, I want to train my dog to remain on their mat in the face of distractions. I train this by introducing a distraction and rewarding my dog for staying on the mat. I start with small distractions and work my way up to larger ones. For Troy, I start with toys, then food, then bigger distractions like the other dogs playing in front of him, knocking at the door, a guest coming in, etc. Keep in mind that what is a small distraction for Troy may be a large distraction for other dogs. For example, Troy does like toys, but some dogs are absolutely bananas for toys so that may be a more difficult distraction for them than it is for him.
Applying My Training to Real Life
Once my dog has learned to settle on a mat, I can ask my dog to do that in circumstances where they might otherwise be doing something that gets on my nerves. I've given a few examples already, but there are so many places that their mat can come in handy. Whenever you are trying to do something around the house and think to yourself, "I wish they would give me some space," "I wish they would just settle down," "I wish they would be more calm in this situation," chances are that they could probably be on their mat instead of doing whatever it is that they are doing to bother you. To teach my dog not to do an infinite number of irritating things, I just have to teach them how to do one thing.
(Remember that your training won't happen as quickly as in the videos I posted. Troy has already had lots of practice with mat work, but your dogs will catch up to him. Be patient, go back a step or two if you need to. Think of the tortoise and the hare - slow and steady wins the race.)
Happy training!
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