Your role in supervising off-leash dog play is to become a good leader, and understand how to implement the keys to good leadership while earning the respect of the dogs to make your job easier.In this lesson you will learn to understand how to divide your time between controlling the playgroups, supervising the dogs, and relaxing as a group. You’ll also learn to recognize confident or challenging dogs and learn how to implement tools to effectively manage them in playgroups, while learning how to set the dogs up for success.
Assessing Where Your At
Complete this Leadership Self-Assessment Chart before continuing on. This will help you to honestly evaluate where you can improve your leadership skills.
Now that you’ve had a chance to score your assessment, you should begin to take an honest look at the areas of weakness and make a commitment to begin working to improve those areas. Don’t worry if your score was lower than you thought it would be. This is just a starting point for you, so you know the direction forward. The good news is you can be an effective leader, it just takes practice. Watch your skills improve as you continue to work on the things you’ve been learning.
With easygoing dogs you will need little leadership, but with other dogs your leadership will need to be stronger, and with really pushy dogs you’ll need to establish yourself as a confident leader in order to manage the group. In other words, your leadership will change depending on the dogs you supervise and can be tailored to each dog. However, the better your leadership skills, the more responsibility you’ll be able to take on by managing larger groups of dogs and the more assertive dogs and you’ll be a more effective employee this way.
This shows some things to consider as you do your job with the dogs. If you find yourself frequently yelling to get the dogs to pay attention, using timeouts frequently, have constantly high arousal levels in the room, can’t get the dogs to respond to you easily, or if the dogs just seem out of control, that means you may want to remind yourself to use your leader skills to improve the environment and behavior of all the dogs.
Exercises to Practice
These exercises can be practiced with each dog in your daycare every time you work a shift.
- Com Cue
- Taking Space
- Controlling Resources
- Controlling Boundaries
- Obedience Games
You learned about these in the last module and saw ways you could begin using them and practice them. You can really never overemphasize the come cue. Getting the dogs to consistently and quickly respond to their names is one of the best goals you can strive for. You can also use your shift to practice taking space and controlling resources and boundaries. Remember that the goal of all these things is to establish yourself as a leader and earn respect from the dogs so you don’t need to use harsh or physical methods to manage play.
Controlling Play Groups
Someone should always be with the dogs when they are playing, just like the safest beaches have a lifeguard on duty. Your goal is to keep the dogs safe by using your knowledge and understanding of dog behavior and your skills as a strong leader.
The best leader interactions will consist of one-third of your time being spent supervising play between the dogs, a third of the time you’re playing games with them, and a third of the time you just relax with the dogs.
Remember that you are like a lifeguard. You need to be the one who calls the shots, manages the behavior of the dogs, stops the dogs when they get too crazy or the arousal level gets too high. You’re on call anytime you’re on the floor with the dogs. You will be able to rest some of the time. One-third of the time should be spent relaxing with the dogs, and the dogs will give themselves breaks from time to time. But if the dogs are up and playing, you need to be observant of what is happening just as a lifeguard is.
Playing Games
Spending one-third of your time playing games is easy if you think of the wide range of fun games you can play with the dogs.
- Follow the leader
- Find the person
- Fetch
- Chasing bubbles
- Tug
- Obedience games
Dogs love to interact with their leader in these games. In follow the leader you just walk around and encourage the dogs to follow you. You’ll be amazed at how many dogs will happily follow you around the room as you walk through the play area. Find the person just means hiding behind a piece of play equipment and calling a dog or two to find you. Playing fetch or tug-of-war with dogs is fun as long as none of the dogs resource guard. And of course, obedience games which we talked about in the last lesson, always helps to establish your leadership. Chasing bubbles is another fun game that can be played by purchasing simple bubble kits from the store.
Watch the video below to watch some games in action.
You can use all of these games to interact with dogs, have fun and establish leadership. Don’t worry if every dog doesn’t respond at first. It does take practice and repetition. Start small and work up to larger groups as the dogs learn to respect you. Remember to watch for arousal levels and don’t play games with toys if you have any resource guarding in the group.
Play Groups Managed by Effective Leaders
You learned earlier how to tell if your leadership skills need improvement, this is another good chart to mark in your book and refer to periodically. This is a list of what a good playgroup will look like.
- Show self-control
- Have a sense of harmony
- Are relatively quiet
- Dog body postures are relaxed
- You rarely see signs of stress
- Balanced play between dogs
- Arousal levels remain low
- Dogs are having fun
- Leader is relaxed but attentiv
The dogs will show self control and have a good overall feel of calm within them. Both the dogs and the supervising people will be calm and relaxed. You won’t see arousal level stay high all the time and the overall stress levels will be low. The leader is functioning as a lifeguard and watching but is not overly assertive and yelling. Most importantly, the dogs are safe and are having fun.
Leadership is the Foundation
If you’ve taken anything away from the last two lessons, hopefully it is the sense that good leadership is the key to good playgroups. Obviously, your center needs to have a good process for screening the dogs that come to play, but leadership is really the foundation to positive, healthy interactions between you and the dogs, and between the dogs playing. The more you improve your skills in this area, the better your playgroup will be. You’ll find that the same group of dogs will act differently depending on who is supervising them. That’s a result of leadership. You need to adjust your leadership to the dogs in your care and be sure to consider the things you’ve learned about the age of development of the dogs, their confidence level as shown by their body language and their playstyle to make quick decisions on the fly as you manage them.
Working with Confident Dogs
Let’s take a moment to talk about the need for an extra dose of good leadership when working with confident dogs. These are dogs that are usually older and seen by the other dogs as natural doggy leaders. These kinds of dogs can be a great asset in a playgroup since they help to keep order in the room.
However, the less mature middle-ranking dogs can sometimes be a challenge, because they try to assert themselves and sometimes find themselves challenging. This can get them into trouble. Sometimes the more confident or pushy dogs need more control and fewer access to resources as a way to help establish leadership with them.
With challenging dogs you will see some common behavior. Watch the video below to see the behaviors in action.
You’ve learned about controlling resources and space. With confident or pushy dogs you need to pay special attention to these tools. These dogs should have to earn access to resources and you may want to keep these dogs out of your personal space and off furniture or play equipment in the rooms.
Setting Dogs Up For Success
Your job in the daycare is to keep the dogs safe. You can do this by getting to know each dog and setting them up for success. Practice your leadership and work with each dog to build a strong relationship based on trust and mutual cooperation. Use access to toys, praise and petting as a way to reward good behavior. Look for ways to catch the dog doing something right. With practice you can be a great leader. Focus on your skills each day and believe in yourself. Don’t forget to refer to your leadership assessment and work on those areas where you can improve and watch the dogs respond to your new skills.