Leave It Without the Leave It

May 5

Lily and her dogs demonstrate the Leave It Without the Leave It exercise.

The "Leave It Without the Leave It" exercise aims to teach dogs that the presence of food is a cue to look at their person. This foundational skill is essential for stimulus control, a traditional "leave it" behavior, and teaching our dogs to wait for instructions instead of offering random behaviors. It also helps dogs learn to be calm around food.

To set up this exercise, place a snuffle mat or an old crumpled towel or blanket on the ground. Fill it with several small treats or kibble for your dog to work on while you get situated. In the video, I sit on an ottoman, but you can also use a low chair or kneel on the ground. Take a handful of small treats in each hand, close your fists around the food, and place your hands behind your back. Deliver the food by tossing a piece or two into the snuffle mat or crumpled blanket for your dog to sniff out. Alternate the hand you deliver the food from to keep your dog centered in front of you.

Before moving on to the next criteria, make sure that your dog is consistently meeting the current criteria ten or more times in a row. Use your marker (such as a word like "yes" or "good," or a clicker) and then reinforce the following criteria by tossing food onto the mat:

Your dog lifts their head. (Mark & reinforce 10 times before moving on!)
Your dog lifts their head towards you.
Your dog's eyes flick towards your face.
Your dog offers full eye contact but without duration.
Your dog maintains full eye contact for between half a second and three seconds.
Once your dog reliably offers full eye contact with three-second duration in a relaxed manner, begin bringing your closed hands full of food into the picture. Start with your hands at your sides, then gradually move them towards the front of your lap.
When your dog can consistently provide relaxed, sustained eye contact even when your hand full of food is right in front of them, start opening your hands. As you do, raise them and move them farther from your dog to account for the added difficulty. Then, gradually and incrementally lower your open hands of food closer to the ground.

If you extend the duration too long and your dog becomes fussy (stomping their feet, breathing heavily, chuffing, barking, or offering other behaviors), scatter more food on the mat and return to earlier steps. If your dog gently bumps your hand, wait calmly and patiently without verbally correcting them. When your dog offers even the slightest bit of attention, mark and feed from the mat right away. Then, revert to previous steps to prevent this issue from recurring. If your dog escalates their behavior while trying to get the food in your hand, calmly remove your hand and start again from step one. Make sure this only happens once! Move through the criteria slowly and methodically to minimize errors. Treat any mistakes as cues for you to make the next repetitions easier. If you encounter a significant number of errors, end the session and try again later, starting back at step one.

Hello, Lily from Spot On Dog Training here demonstrating an exercise called “Leave it without the leave it.”
To set up this exercise, I want you to grab an old towel or blanket and crumple it up into a makeshift snuffle mat, if you don’t already have one. We have one, so we’re using that, and we start by scattering several small treats in the blanket or snuffle mat so that your dog can be working on those while you’re getting yourself ready. You’re going to grab two handfuls of small treats in each of your hands and close them and put your hands behind your back to start. Eventually, we will fade your hands in front of your dog and then open them.
First, I am working with my younger & antsier puppy, Bertie. She is very new to this exercise, so with her I am primarily focused on first building duration in her attention on me before I’m going to start bringing my hands full of food more into the picture. Basically, Bertie and I are playing the Up-Down pattern game and trying to slowly stretch the amount of time that she is looking at me before I mark. I am using the marker word “yes” to communicate to her “Yes, I like what you just did, here comes your reinforcement.”
Because Bertie is still learning to be patient, I’m not going to start fading in my hands full of treats into the picture yet. She is occasionally getting fussy and huffing her breath at me or stomping her foot a little. That is an indicator to me that I am rising the criteria too fast for her and I need to go back a couple of steps. So when that happens, I’m trying to make it easier and marking and reinforcing more quickly before trying to stretch that time out again. Once she can readily offer me eye contact with every rep in a relaxed way for three seconds, then I will start bringing my hands full of food into the picture, first at my sides and then gradually bringing them in front of me. But, because she is a puppy and still learning, this is where we’re at right now.
Now I am going to show you what this exercise looks when I practice with my older dog, Randall. Randall has more experience playing this game and is further along in his training journey, so with him, I can move through my criteria more quickly and begin bringing my closed hands into the picture closer to him and eventually even begin opening them. It is important to note that for the sake of this demonstration video, I am moving through the steps very fast. You might notice Randall huffing at me a couple times and taking quite a while before he offers me eye contact once we get to the criteria where my hands are open. In real training sessions, I wouldn’t move on to the next step until Randall was consistently offering me eye contact immediately and in a relaxed way. But like I said, this is a video where I’m trying to demonstrate the steps of this exercise, so we do see some of that.
So as I’m starting, just like I did with Bertie, I have my hands closed and behind my back. I’m waiting for some nice duration eye contact and he is offering it to me. Because he was offering me like a good three seconds of eye contact in a nice, relaxed way, I started to bring my hands forward, but they’re still closed and I’m just slowly fading them into the picture. Once he’s offering me eye contact, after a couple of seconds I’m marking with the word “yes” and then feeding him a treat from the snuffle mat. And you can see, he is a little impatient and stompy here. Like I said, in a real world training session, if I was doing this with him, I wouldn’t be moving on until he was offering me very relaxed eye contact for a nice duration of like three seconds before I made it harder. Now, I’m making it harder by opening my hands, but because I’m raising that criteria and I know it’s going to be more difficult for him, I’m pulling them back further so they are farther away from him and a little higher. The lower food is to the ground, the harder it’s going to be for your dog to leave it. So that’s why I start with them high, and then I’m slowly and incrementally lowering them, still marking and reinforcing for eye contact and still delivering the treat from the snuffle mat. He’s doing a nice job of looking at me immediately right now, but because I just started to get lower, like I said he’s taking, he’s starting to take a while to offer me that eye contact. So because he took so long to offer me the eye contact on that rep, I lifted my hands back up higher to try and make it easier for him on the next rep and we are much more successful- he’s immediately offering me eye contact. There! That small adjustment of backing up a step for a little bit, helped him be successful. He’s consistently offering me eye contact, so I’m continuing to lower it for the sake of this video. I’ve got my hands right on the ground now, full of treats. And because this is so hard for him, and like I said, I’m moving faster than I would in a real world training session, I’m marking very quickly, almost the moment that he’s offering me eye contact instead of trying to wait for a good three seconds of relaxed eye contact. But he’s doing really well. I just had the food completely on the ground and he’s leaving it. And so I’m marking with food, delivering it in his snuffle mat, and I’m also picking up the food each time that I set it on the ground so it’s not just sitting there for a long time because that’s going to make it a lot harder for him.
Then I finished the session here because he has been pretty successful and I want to end before we start seeing more errors.