Games and play are always hot topics among dog enthusiasts. People want to accomplish many goals with play as the launching pad to great things. I got the idea for Cheese Game working with people who wanted to engage their puppies, young adults and adult dogs in play for various reasons. Most of these families wanted a roadmap for an interactive play that would animate and excite their dogs. They had a vision of what it might look like without knowing where to begin.
When you think of it, there is no road map for how to teach the bones of games to dogs? And when you work with dogs, teaching means doing because our words and images don’t translate unless our dogs are doing something.
We need to learn games too. When we’re little we begin with Peekaboo, Candyland and Go Fish. And when we’re learning about how games work we are also learning about communication and team building and project collaboration. Most of the time, people teaching games to children are encouraging and helping their students learn and feel empowered.
We don’t really have stepping stones for teaching dogs how games work. But I was thinking about how we could get a huge benefit from baby stepping what game playing looks and feels like to a dog.
Presentation is everything.
Foundationally, our games with dogs have beginnings, endings and an interactive middle which changes. The content of games is a movable feast: it’s function and nature evolves over time with criteria in constant flux. Learning is a team sport. To me, it is critical that the beginning of any learning experience for dogs focus on high reinforcement for simple behaviors. We’re the teacher in a plethora of microskills which translates to having real traction and involvement in our dogs' learning. We’re also the learner as seeing what ‘lights our dogs up from within’ is what we need to be learning about them.
Learning that seems inconsequential or barely noticeable in the moment may help our dogs learn skills that they use for the rest of their lives. Strengthening communication is an asset as we are constantly communicating with our dogs assuming they understand what we mean. It’s helpful to take the time to show them how games work, point by point.
Play is an activity that can have a life of it’s own and a place in a dog’s life that does not flip into any other thing. A way to preserve the joy of playing games with your dog is to remember that it’s a game not an assignment. It is always a language between the two of you. The time you spend playing the games that develop between you and your dog can be like playing games with your friends when you were a child. Who doesn’t look back at some of those times as magical? You have the ability to begin a Story of Play with your dog and to have tha be part of your individual life with this dog. If you have more than one dog then you can tell more than one story. How amazing!
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