Keely teaches a dog named Caesar to accept a muzzle by letting him investigate it at his own pace, rewarding nose touches, and gradually building duration with treats inside. She avoids force entirely, using only positive reinforcement to get him to willingly wear it.
Chapters
Hey guys, welcome to today's short set. My name is Keely, and today we're going to go a little bit over muzzle socialization. So today we worked with Caesar. He's one of our client dogs, and a little bit about Caesar, he's a little bit a scared skittish and scared of new objects and new things, so when introducing that muzzle to him, I didn't want to put too much on him too fast. So I kind of let him investigate it, and then I rewarded him for investigating that muzzle. Once he got a little bit comfortable and he wasn't jumping back and running away, that's when I started pairing that command with the action. As you see, I started trying to hold my hand above the muzzle to kind of get him to start putting his nose in it. And then once he put his nose in it, I would start rewarding him for that. Towards the end, he started actually going up to it on his own. I put some treats inside of it. He started going up to it on his own, so I would pair that command muzzle with him putting his nose inside of the muzzle, and then obviously he got his treats, and then he got big praise and big love from me. The biggest thing about muzzle socialization is we don't want to force the dog to do something that they might be uncomfortable with or uncertain about. Obviously with Caesar, In the beginning, he was really uncertain about it and he didn't know what it was, so I don't want to force it onto him. I want him to slowly, just on his own, just start investigating it. And so in the end, it's just his own decision to put that muzzle on. And then adding in that command, uh, in the end he knows what to do. And then slowly just start lifting those straps over, and eventually he'll be comfortable with putting that muzzle on and having it on for a longer duration of time. Thanks for coming to the source set. Catch us on Friday, uh, and we'll see you next week.
