[nagdu] Find the stairs

[Shanna Stichler]

Hi Minh,

You could just start completely over with stairs, similar to teaching 
how to find a chair. It sounds like she hasn't really generalized the 
idea of finding all kinds of stairs, in different areas, etc. I don't 
recall my GDB dogs really understanding that either until they'd worked 
on finding stairs with me on a regular basis. If your dog tries to show 
you stairs you don't really want, it's fine to just tell her "hop up" 
and not reward for that particular flight with kibble. I just verbally 
praise my dogs when they start to turn their heads or pull me towards a 
light pole, a doorway, or flight of stairs, and then encourage them to 
keep going. They eventually figure out which places I really like, as 
those are the ones they get the best rewards.

Or, you can just pattern her to find specific flights of stairs only, if 
you'd prefer. I'm one who would rather have a dog show me too much than 
not enough, but teaching a dog specific routes can be useful, especially 
on a college campus.

Hope this helps,
Shanna and Diamond
  :DOn 8/23/2013 3:24 PM, minh ha wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm moving back to campus in a week and my school has a million and a
> half flights of stairs all over campus. Viva does amazingly on stairs,
> but the only problem is her understanding of the word "stairs" isn't
> as strong as I like it to be. She was exposed to it at GDB and she was
> able to find a couple of flights of stairs during my training, but now
> that we're home, she doesn't seem to understand what I want. I was
> wondering what suggestions you guys have for teaching this to her? I
> was thinking of finding a bunch of stairs and clicker her while saying
> the word stairs, but the only issue I can see with that is she'll
> bring me to every single flight of stairs that we pass, which would
> get annoying pretty quick. Thanks in advance.
>
> Cheers,
> Minh
>