Getting over fear of the stairs

Last week, the trainer told me that Keiko needs to have his obedience training down pat first before moving into the alert training.  From scanning the internet, I've come across the clicker training, and the results are astounding.  First I need to post a journal entry from two weeks ago, so you can see how far he's come in a short time.

Training a new dog is challenging. With the right encouragement dogs do things that normally terrify them. Most dogs fear being off the ground the way certain people fear heights. Training dogs to walk over a moving seesaw in an agility class takes lots of time and more than just encouraging words. Dogs need something that excites them so much that it overcomes the fear. For some a squeaky toy works, for others only the reward of food will entice them to take a step of faith.

My new dog feared walking on the stairs to my condo. As long as the stairs were solid concrete and didn’t show any daylight between them, he was fine. If the could see daylight, he would not budge at all. If the food reward was within a few feet where he could stretch out his neck and eat without moving his back feet, he’d climb two stairs. Only when he trusted me did he climb additional stairs with tidbits of food on each stair—up, but not down.

Now that it was time for him to walk down the stairs with me, he balked. He ate every piece of food within his reach and ignored the food if it meant he must move his back feet off the top stair. Why didn’t he trust me now when he just learned that going up the open-space stairs would not cause him to fall? I clapped, clucked, snapped my fingers, spoke kind words, hung food in front of his nose, but he wouldn’t move. It was time to do something more drastic.

I picked him up and put him right in the middle of the stairs where he would be terrified. After a few minutes, he walked upstairs, knowing he could do this safely. After two more repeats of this, he finally chose to come down with me—another fear conquered. He got rewarded with food tidbits, hugs and praise. Now he’ll be excited about getting to go to new places because of overcoming his fear of stairs.