Sierra Learns To Sit For Her Meal

I have found teaching a dog to sit for her/his meal is the easiest way to introduce the "sit" cue. This is how I achieve a sit for a meal. First of all I don't even start doing this until my new foster dog has been with us a few days or like in Sierra's case a couple of weeks. Training is a wonderful way to build a relationship with a dog but a lot of times new foster dogs like Sierra aren't even comfortable sitting in front of me in the beginning. Here is another foster parent's wonderful post about this very topic. Sit Happens: Adjusting Expectations.

I feed foster dogs in a private room. This way they can eat as slow as they want and they don't have to feel like my dogs are bearing down on them trying horn in on their dish.

When I felt like Sierra and I had a good realtionship I kicked it up a notch and had her do a sit before I put her food dish down. The first few times it looked something like this.

1. I walk in with her dish and stand there holding it, not making eye contact and just wait. At this point Sierra was moving around getting excited and wondering why I was just standing there. She even got up on the couch then she went to the ottoman and sat down. That was good enough for me, so I quickly marked that sit with a "yes!" and put her food dish down and walked out and closed the door behind me.

2. The next meal I did the same thing, Sierra did a similar thing and jumped on the couch then back down then bounced her paws off me, then finally she did sit. "yes!" and the dish went down

3. Next meal Sierra didn't jump on the couch, but she did stand and stare at me for a while. Then she did a "sit", I said "Yes!" put the food dish down.

4. Next meal I could tell she was going to sit right away so I said "sit", boom she sat right down, "yes!" reward.

5. Sierra knows exactly what to do and she now runs along with me and runs into the room to "sit", and boom she gets her meal.

The next step will be for her to wait a bit longer and for us to start working on her waiting for me to let her know she can "break" and start eating, but right now we are just going to work on the basic sit.

Here are a couple of videos of her doing this. The first one is me recording myself and her and the second one is of Dave walking in to feed her. In that one you can also see her use all four legs as she gets really excited to get her meal.

Sierra sits for her meal

Sierra sits for her food 2