You don’t have to wait until the breweries reopen to prepare your dog to be the best brewery buddy! The time to practice your skills is now at home before dropping your dog in the deep end at the brewery and expecting them to swim. Join us for our weekly mini-series on what skills you and your dog should practice before attending a large event, like a busy brewery tap-room.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be discussing several ways you can start your practice NOW, at home, so that you can jump back into brewery hangouts and events with a confident four-legged brewery buddy at your side!
Start Small & Practice at Home! (See Below!)
Review Essential Skills for success (Next up in our blog series!):
Settle on a Mat
Calm & Polite Greetings
Polite Ordering Routine
Walking Past Distractions
Start Small & Practice In Easier Environments, Like Your Home!
In order to ensure our dogs are ready to attend a larger event or fully crowded tap room, we must first start small! Your dog should have foundational skills like settle on a mat, polite leash walking, and friendly greetings to strangers, but before we take these skills to the big leagues we need to build up to more distractions.
Try taking your dog to a local cafe at an awkward time, maybe in the mid-morning and practice all your skills to make sure your dog feels confident and comfortable. (If you aren’t able to visit any cafes or public areas right now due to the pandemic, another option is to ask a neighbor if you can use their back patio when they are at work!) When your dog has mastered that level, being able to settle & focus on you in a new place, you can increase the difficulty by changing to a time like the lunch hour where there will be more distractions and noises. If your dog has a hard time performing their asked behaviors, then you’ve advanced too quickly and need to go back to an easier level.
Once they are again confidently able to do their skills during the lunch hour, then they might be ready to take on the big leagues of a busy evening at the brewery! Make sure you have practiced at this more advanced level before taking your dog to a large event where you know there might be an abundance of other dogs and people.
In order to keep events, breweries, and patios dog-friendly, it is our responsibility as dog owners to make sure we have appropriate expectations for our dogs and set them up for success. Practice makes perfect! So, start small and work your way up that big event you have coming up!
We’ll see you next week for the next installment in this blog series where we’ll talk more about the specific skills needed for brewery success! In the meantime, pull out your dog’s training gear and dust off some of those rusty skills at home!
