One of the most common reasons a dog is refused service at the groomer over is fighting for their feet. A dog that doesn’t want their feet touched may bite the groomer, roll violently, thrash, scratch the groomer vigorously, or pull the foot as hard as they can.
If you take the time to think about it, this is very understandable. Imagine first how a wild animal would act if you had hold of their foot. It’s not natural or normal to gently give another creature, not of your species, a paw and then wait patiently for them to do what ever they’re going to do with that huge pair of pliers-looking things and their nails.
Just imagine if an alien ship beamed you up, aliens restrained you in some way, grabbed hold of your hand, and brought some strange contraption toward your fingertips. Do you think you’d just let them do it? Probably not.
Since this is a very sensitive topic, we’re going to approach foot handling indirectly, and in several different parts, and great news! You’ve already gotten part of it done! Or have you?
For The People Skipping Directly to Foot Handling
If you bypassed introducing your dog to the table, the wobble board, and the lead and went straight to foot handling because that’s your dogs “problem,” go back and start at the beginning.
The groom training program starts with the groom table itself for a reason, and it’s not just because we had to start somewhere. We start with those things to avoid trigger stacking, which is where a dog blows up not because their foot was touched, but because touching their foot was the last straw.
By conditioning them to the easier stuff, you remove triggers that may make learning to have their feet handled harder. This in turn makes foot handling easier, which is going to be hard enough even at the best of times.
Training your dog to do tasks also warms them up to the idea that when you are working on groom training, it’s going to be fun and involve lots of treats. By practicing on easy stuff, which isn’t quite so alarming to your dog, you give them something to reflect back on when you’re working on harder stuff.
If they’re not sure about this foot stuff, but they’ve had no less than 4 different concepts that weren’t too scary and didn’t hurt, they’re more likely to give it a try.
The only time I’d recommend going out of order on this program is muzzle training if your dog may bite. We already have a general article on muzzle training, as well as a video on how to do it, but we’ll be going over it again for this article series.
If you have a dog who may be aggressive, it’s best to muzzle your pup while training for everyone’s protection.
Foot Handling Part One
Because feet are so sensitive, we’re not going to approach desensitization directly, and we’ll be doing it in several different ways. The next few weeks we will teach the following concepts:
- Touch a target with a foot
Touching a target doesn’t involve trusting a human with their foot, and it means them giving their foot and not you taking it. - Make the target your hand
It’s their choice to put their foot on your hand, again not you taking it. This will become the trick, “Shake!” - Touch desensitization from shoulder to feet
After indirectly experiencing touch desensitization by having them touch you, we’ll move on to touching their feet starting at a neutral area. - Touching nails
- Manipulating toes
- Other tricks that involve foot touching
- The power of the harness
We’ll be going over each one in turn, starting with indirect handling, using a target (I like a Tupperware lid but you can use just about anything as a target, including a rag.) To help the dog learn a specific request, ‘May I have your foot?’ and a rewarded response, the foot on the target.
Although we’ll just train one foot in the video, we’ll also go over how to train all the other feet, so your dog can learn to have each foot handled on an individual basis. Since foot handling is so vast, we will be breaking this up into several different articles so we can explore each training concept thoroughly.
Similar Posts:
- Foot Handling: Touching a Target
- Foot Handling: “Give Me 5!”
- What To Do When Your Dog Training Stalls
- If You Know Your Dog Is Aggressive
- How to Teach Your Dog to Use a Scratch Board
