Manding

You will find I use the term “Manding” a lot in my articles. Manding is a term used from “Puppy Culture”. It is a system that some breeders use when having a litter of puppies, to get them ready for them to go to their forever homes. It is essentially teaching manners. Notice we will be doing all of our training in small steps.

When a puppy is born it gets lots of attention from its mother. The puppy just lays there and momma cleans him and helps him “Do his business” then cleans up after him. As the puppy grows older and begins moving around he still wants attention. The way he learns to get attention from his mother is by jumping on her. He also learns that to get attention from littermates, and to play he jumps on them. Jumping becomes a major way he gets attention. So how do we change this behavior? Noone wants to have a dog constantly jumping on them. What we want is for them to sit and give us attention. With several week old puppies that can be difficult, but fun. If you have already begun clicker training (Loading the clicker) this will actually be fun and easy.

The first step is to teach them to look at you. When the puppy looks at you click and treat. Do this repeatedly. They look at you, click and treat. It can be just a glance when begin, or even an eye flick towards you, click and treat. They will soon learn to look you in the eye, then click and treat. They will probably still be jumping on you at this point, so the next step once they consistently look at you is to wait while they look at you and when they get off of you, click and treat.  Once they get used to standing and looking at you then we wait for a sit. that can take a while for them to figure out. Each of these steps may take several training sessions. Training sessions should only be a few seconds, to a minute for a young puppy, for older dogs no longer than 2-3 minutes. Always try to stop on a “Win”.

They key is patents, just wait, stand and wait. When the puppy sits, click and treat. He will get excited and stand up, so that can reset the exercise for another round, wait and click and treat again when he sits. If you have a litter of puppies the others will want a treat too and may begin mimicking the puppy that’s getting the treat. Click and treat for each puppy that sits. If you are training only one puppy it’s much easier, click and treat each time he sits. Since you already taught them to look at you they will probably be looking at you when they sit, just as the puppies are in the photo below.

Teaching Manding to a litter of puppies

As you can see in the picture several puppies have begun to Mand while others are walking around. This is fine and normal. Just click and treat the ones who want attention. We never called them over and did not give any commands, we just wait till they offer the behavior we want then we mark the behavior by using the clicker and reward them with a treat. This will even work with older dogs. It just takes time. Wait for them to sit. As they learn this behavior you will not even need to use the x-pen they will be all around you at your feet. This is the positive manding behavior we want, they ask for our attention by sitting and looking at us. Be sure to reward when they offer this behavior. When rewarding be sure not to send a mixed signal to the dog by letting them jump on you as a reward. That would become confusing to the dog, always try to be clear in what you want from your dog, that will make training so much smoother.