Place training is such a valuable skill for all dogs. Living in a multi dog home I feel like my house would be chaos without this skill!

Place, what is it? The end criteria is the dog lays down and settles on target or boundary (like a bed, blanket, raised bed, towel, bath mat, whatever) until they are given a release or told the next thing to do. The place should become a chill out zone.

So here are the steps to teach. I teach this basically the same way I teach a dog to go into their crate. Through shaping and building value for laying on the mat.

1. Lure the puppy/dog onto the mat, mark YES and feed when they are in that down
2. Give a few food rewards for staying laid down on the mat
3. Reset the puppy with a 'find it' tossing a treat away from the mat so they get off and get that. Not too far away to begin with.
4. Now wait to see what your dog offers. We want to see if they are starting to understand that there is value in going to that mat. Shape the process from here, break the behaviour down into tiny pieces. So mark and reward for orienting back to the mat, then for looking at the mat, then one paw on, two paws, all four paws, all four paws and sitting and then finally hopefully they are racing back to the mat and laying down.

In this video you see Edamame is at the stage where he chooses to come back to the mat and sit. When I give him the food reward I am luring him the rest of the way into the down to encourage him to choose to go into a down next time.

Place training like this is something you can practice whilst cooking dinner, or whilst watching tv. It only requires a couple of minutes here and there to really start building value for the mat.

My girls now will lay down on anything I place down, whether its a cushion, a towel, a bed, or a yoga mat (less desirable when I actually want to do yoga but I love that they have generalised the skill nonetheless).

Don't worry about duration of staying on the place at this point. To begin with we need to build value for just being on it. Building value will make building duration a lot easier when we are ready for that step.

I think it's important to see, not only a trainer succeeding at teaching behaviours but also clients as well. So here is Elmo's mum nailing their place training too!