Chima and the Harness Part Two: Creating a Conditioned Emotional Response

In my last post I told you the story leading up to Chima and the harness - why it initially wasn't a good choice for her and the options we used instead. In this post I'm going to tell you about our training work to get to the point where when I put on the harness it is a happy exciting thing. We've got a lot of work to do because Chima takes awhile to trust new things, especially if they are going to be touching her.

The reason why Chima and I  are working so diligently on getting used to wearing a harness is that she is starting a training class with me and the instructor asks us to make sure all our dogs are wearing harnesses in class, preferably one with two points to connect a leash to: in front of the chest and in the typical place, over the shoulders. I really should have started working on this a few weeks ago because we only have a week until class starts so I'm going to have to get a lot of tiny little sessions in with her every day and I'm sure we still will need to use the ThunderLeash in the first couple classes.

My goal with Chima and the harness is to create a conditoned emotional response (CER) when she sees and wears the harness. The first step is I have been sitting with her, lying the harness across my lap and marking and reinforcing with a treats when she looks at it. After a couple sessions (and a session usually doesn't last more than 3 minutes or so) she was getting excited when she saw me reach for the harness because she knows it means that treats are coming. So I have conditioned an emotional response of happy excitement when she sees the harness. When we started out: harness = nothing. She could care less about it. Now harness = tasty rewards and just seeing the harness causes that CER to happen. Are you still with me?

Our tools: yummy treats, a clicker, and Chima's harness

So now that I have a predictable response to the harness every single time - prancing and tail wags and happy wiggly body language - it's time to move to the next step. Now I hold the harness up with the head loop open should she choose to stick her head through. She's not going to yet but the point is to get her curious about what I'm doing. She noses the harness and I mark the touch of the harness and reward her. Yay Chima! We'll continue this until it's obvious she loves the game and at some point when she touches the harness I'm going to hold the treat with my arm through the middle of the harness head loop and she'll eat from it there. Slowly as I notice she is completely relaxed and still loving our game, we'll move to holding a treat in one hand and the harness loop open with the other. She'll start to move her head partly through the loop towards my hand and I'll mark that movement of  the head into the harness and let go of the treat.

Do you get the point? The key to this is letting Chima tell me when she's ready for the next step. Not until she seems not only comfortable but consistently enjoying the game will I move to the next step.

Eventually we work up to her putting her head through the loop and me setting the harness in place around her chest and then rewarding while I remove it. That way she isn't paying attention to it coming off and we are all reset for the next repetition. And then the next step after that is getting her used to clicking the loop under her chest and then immediately unclicking it and removing the harness. Once she is enjoying the clicking it on and then taking it off we start to lengthen the duration of her wearing it before it comes off. And pretty soon we are walking around with her wearing the harness.

In the video below you see where Chima and I have worked up to. She is now putting her head through the harness on her own. That behavior is marked with a click and then rewarded as I take her harness off. Our next step will be to work on some duration where she will be marked and rewarded after the harness has been on her for awhile. If any of my trainer friends are reading this and have a better idea of what a next step should be, be sure to email me and let me know!

For your average dog the steps don't have to be as tiny as they do for a fearful dog. For Chima I am going to take it super slow because at no point do I want her to associate the harness with feelings of stress. Then I end up moving backwards so it pays to slow things down. This can be a pretty quick process with a confident, smart dog and can be done in a couple days of regular work. For Chima I'm guessing it will take us a few weeks but I really don't know because she is the one who will be setting the pace.

This is a long post but I just wanted to lay out how a thing that has the potential to be uncomfortable and frightening can be turned into something that instead triggers a response of joy and excitement. And isn't that what we want a harness to do? It should signal great things like walks or trips in the car or to the off leash park to chase a ball and have one on one time being the center of our attention.  The more you use this method of conditioning an emotional response as part of your training plan, the faster your dog will move through the process since they will trust you even more and know that time spent with you means great things are going to happen.