The Yoga Of Teaching My Dog To Sit

Soy Sauce has been in my life for about two months. Soy Sauce is a Retired Racing Greyhound. She has never lived in a home, and she has never had to deal with owners who are not that familiar with greyhounds. For more musings about Soy Sauce, click here.

My husband and I have been trying to teach her to sit. We consider it a basic command, and our dog behaviorist said that it wouldn’t be that hard. We were all somewhat mistaken.

Her muscular back legs make it difficult for her to sit down. Her hamstrings basically get in the way. As a result, it has been a challenge to teach her to sit. Most of the conventional tips for teaching a dog to sit do not work for her.

So we’ve been trying a custom approach. She is learning how to lie down and she has been doing relatively well. For whatever reason, there is a particular dental chew stick (Insert shameless plug for Pedigree Dentastix here.) that she absolutely loves. The stick even beats raw meat, cooked meat, or any other type of meat. When she sees it, she does try to lie down, but she ends up in a sit instead. My husband posits that she is so excited she can’t lie down even if she wanted to.

What I’ve found through this experience is that teaching her to sit is a yoga practice in itself.

Her training consists of repeating the same commands and the same movements over and over again. Some days, she will follow the command on the first try. On others, it will take several tries. But as with each lesson or practice, we always spend a few moments with her at the beginning to help her focus.

Ironically, we have been trying to find a way for her to practice her maha asana which is sit. She struggles to find a comfortable sitting position and consequently she also struggles to sit in a steady position.

Additionally, since we have been unable to use conventional methods for teaching her to sit, we’ve had to focus more on what she can do to help modify her training so she can learn to sit.

Watching and experiencing her toils and successes reminds me of teaching yoga. I'm just lucky that I get to go along the journey with her.

The Yoga of Dog Food

Our newest family member is learning to wait while I make her breakfast and put it in her food stand. The ideal is that she would wait on her bed patiently until I put her food bowl down and then come for her food when I call for her.

This morning I stood by her bed with her food bowl in hand. Once she calmed herself and laid down on her bed, the sequence started. I would call out the command to wait as I walked towards her food bowl stand. If she waited, I would go until I put the bowl down. If not, I would come back to her bed to wait again.

I treated her bed as a place for her to reset and calm down. If she was too excited about the food to listen to me, then she would need to calm down and lay on her bed. If she was too confused by the command, then could go to her bed to help her release some anxiety. For her, her bed became her yoga mat.

There were three times where I put the food bowl down and almost called out to her to come and get her food when she excitedly ran to her food too early. At each almost successful sequence, I was disappointed that she was unable to wait for just a few moments longer. But with each almost successful sequence, I would start over again and wait for her to calm down and lay down on her bed.

Oddly enough, she knew that with each unsuccessful attempt, she should come back to her bed.

The entire lesson took 45 minutes, and I was unable to go to the gym in this morning. There were several moments where I wanted to quit, but my husband kept asking me to try one more time to get the command to work.

She eventually waited long enough and she was given her breakfast.

Both she and I learned our lessons this morning. For her, she was learning to wait. For me, I was learning to come back to the mat.