Back Stall Foundation | Working Positions & Behaviors for the Back Stall

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Marty and Apryl have a sweet back stall. He’s got a great sit pretty, and he switches sides fairly reliably while in a stall in super cute fashion. It’s not quite finished, though. 

If you have tried to teach Sit Pretty in a back stall, you might know what I’m talking about… Not at all an easy skill.

Given the difficulty of reward placement and extreme generalization, it often takes an additional person or many, many reps to bring this skill together. 

It’s how we started it, but then I remembered something…

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Apryl asked me to come out and help her deliver cookies. She marked, and I paid. But Marty was paying too much attention to me, my treat sack, and the cookies in my hand. 

Normally, you just deal with this and fadeOverstable discs are likely to hyzer out. That means they are likely to fall away from the direction of the spin. For clockwise spinning throws, the overstable disc wants to fall to the More out the secondary handler. But then I remembered our Foot StallA Stall has the dog leaping up and chilling out on the handler’s back. Stalls are great for showmanship and for presenting a dog to the crowd. They create a dramatic or emotive More stuff using a pedestalSpot is a “go to a place”, or “go to a mat” behavior. This means that the dog seeks out and performs a duration behavior on a spot of the handler’s choosing. A More from 2012. The idea back in the day was to simulate the relative position of dog and handler and get the dog comfortable with duration and receiving payment with the handler below the dog. This is a major hurdle for most dogs — it’s just weird to take cookies while sitting above your handler.

And here we are. No cramps from bending over. No dumping the dog off when trying to give a cookie, and no pressure or risk of damaging your actual back stall. 

Apryl added in the Switch behavior and the sit to keep things interesting and help generalize and gain stimulus control over the main skills used in the Back StallA Stall happens when your dog leaps up and stays on a part of your body. Stalls are usually named by the part of your body they happen on.  If your dog leaps More position. 

We’ll be giving this a shot actually on Apryl’s back tomorrow. It should be a quick Boom — Pow operation. Check back soon to see how it went. 

Happy Jamming!