11,5 wk female weimaraner. I've started some calm settle training using kikopup's method. Been training for 4 days now. 1-2 short sesions everyday. Sessions where I'm actively practicing last between 10 seconds and 5 minutes. In these sessions I will sit on a couch (she has a dogbed next to the couch) or on the floor on a mat, throw out a treat and then lure her back to me in a down. I feed her some treats and if she stays down I tell her "good" and treat again. If she stays down for a few more seconds I repeat "good" and treat again. I keep going for 10ish treats. Tell her "all done" and stay seated. I do this cuz I hope she'll stay down with me and maybe find her own chill. But she tends to get up pretty quick and tries to engage me for play.
Every day so far I've also taken one moment where I sit on the couch, leash her and just try to be super boring, hoping she will eventually lay down and settle. This has only been succesful two times so far. If she doesn't settle within 10-15 minutes then I stop it and we do something else. The two times it worked I calmly put some treats between her paws to reinforce her calm settle. One time she stayed down so after a few minutes she got another quiet reward. She stayed down for about 10 minutes, then seemed to lose her chill and wanted attention. The other time she got up and tried mugging me for treats so I switched to doing no mugging training.
I think I'm doing it right, but I'm not sure because she hasn't offered any calm settles herself. She'll settle and sleep in her crate no problem when I put her in for a nap. She'll happily snuggle up on my lap to settle and take naps. But she won't go in her crate or lie down and settle on her dogbed next to the couch. The only exceptions are when she has a chew, but that doesn't feel like calmly settling, more like taking her prize somewhere.
I've been training other things with her, no biting, no mugging, touching her to prep for grooming, coming when called. And she has been superquick and enthousiastic about picking it up and improves with every session. I'm not seeing that in the settle training though, which is also why I worry I'm not doing it right. Every session feels like it could be the first, like we're not improving.
Sorry for the long ramble 😅
submitted by /u/Magpiebrain
[link] [comments]