Nail Trims… The bane of many owner’s very existence, aren’t they? So many dogs hate them, many owner’s are frustrated trying to wrestle what is essentially an alligator doing a death roll. They can be frustrating, but it can also be dangerous, both for us, and for our dogs when not introduced properly. And even more damaging to our best friend’s emotional well being when we force these traumatizing events on them, without trying to find ways to make them feel better.
What I’ve been working on with my own dogs, is giving them choices. This isn’t a new concept. In fact, it’s used frequently in the training world, giving dogs choices to make their own decisions. One of my rescue dogs in particular, is not entirely fond of handling, and that’s okay! Not every dog has to love being touched and coddled. Boone has always been this way and finds it very aversive and uncomfortable. So we work within his comfort zone.
Instead, what I have been teaching Boone, is that if he offers a paw and lets me handle it, he gets a reward. A yummy, high value treat, to be exact. And we built it up. He knew Shake a Paw, so we built up him offering his paws through something called free-shaping. With this, I waited for him to present a behavior(something that might lead into him offering or holding his paw up for me). So for this, he would go to paw at me or place his paw on me, and using the clicker, I would capture the behavior with a click and follow it immediately with a treat. And from there, we built it up slowly in increments. So once he was reliably offering his paw on his own, I would capture and reward me reaching for that paw, and then eventually, touching and handling the paw, and then having the clippers in proximity to us, and me touching his paws with the clippers. This went on over several sessions.
We are now at a point, where I can trim one nail at a time, provided he offers the paw. Now, if he sees me sitting on the floor with the clippers, he begins offering his paw to me. We still change it up, sometimes I clip a nail and sometimes I don’t. When I do clip a nail, I often give him a jackpot(several tossed treats, versus just one) to make it highly rewarding.
There are days where he is comfortable with allowing me to handle his paws and doing these sessions and days where he isn’t and we work within his comfort zone. He is allowed to pull away and move away from me and has the choice of whether he wishes to offer his paws or not. This has made nail trimming stress free, for both himself and for me!
Here is a short clip of me working on one of these sessions with Boone. You can see he approaches and lifts a paw, which I then take in my hand, clip a nail, then toss a treat. He then returns to once again, begin offering his paw, which you can see he begins lifting in my direction once again:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bk3xOIGALs3/?taken-by=beyonddogtrainingservices
