The next step for my little guy is to get him to take, hold, and give a small medicine pill container. Each night (not at medicine time), I work for a few minutes on him taking (me putting the container in his mouth), holding (keeping it in his mouth) and giving (letting go of the container). We usually do about 10 reps at each setting. Sometimes I give it to him and have him give it to someone else, like my husband or daughter (so it is passing it between two people).
The point of this training is to get him used to having my pill container in his mouth (the one we use for training is a duplicate of my actual medicine container). Once he gets these three down pat, I will work on him picking it up when I point to it (Get). The step beyond that will be to see if I can get him to “get” the medicine container at medicine time and bring it to me.
This will be helpful if I am in the middle of something, and don’t recognize his attempt to remind me that it is time to take meds. It will also be helpful if we are somewhere other than at home so my routine is unsettled. When we are here, I am nearly always sitting on the bed with the meds on my nightstand, so there would be no reason for him to go and get them, but if I am visiting my mother, I might be in the family room, and he would need to retreive them fromthe guest room and bring them to me to remind me it is time to take them.
In addition, teaching him take, hold, and give will also be the base of all fetching skills he will need. Fetching tissues, fetching keys, fetching other small items. I will still need to teach him what those items are, of course, but once he understands the basic idea of getting things and bringing them to me, teaching him what each item is won’t be too difficult. Of course, being a small dog, he isn’t going to be able to bring me large items.
However, there is a solution to some of that: handles. If the item has a handle (even if the handle has been added to it), a dog can be taught to drag the item. Dogs can drag an item that is heavier than something that they can lift. This same idea is used when a service dog is taught to open a refrigerator dog by pulling a rope tied to the handle. I don’t know that I will need to teach my little guy to do that, but it is the same basic idea.
