Chewie and I have a new behavior we have been working on recently — a chin rest!
Here’s how this behavior works:
- I hold out my hand, under Chewie’s head
- Chewie backs up a couple of steps
- She stops when the underside of her head touches my hand
- I reposition my hand slightly so my hand fully contacts her head
- She holds her head still, maintaining contact with my hand
Long term, I’m hoping we can use this behavior for some veterinary tasks and daily care task.
Once the chin rest is solid, it will give me a way to ask her to hold her head still if I needed to examine her eyes or something on her face. As well, I could use this behavior when using a rag to put fly spray on her face or when applying ointment to a wound on her face.
The chin rest will also give her a way to opt-in and opt-out when we are doing veterinary tasks or other tasks that might potentially be unpleasant.
Right now, however, we are just working on the basics for this behavior!
Chewie can do a really solid chin rest for a handful of seconds, and we are working on gradually building the duration for this behavior.
One of my goals for this year is to build more long-duration behaviors and to experiment with different ways to build duration.
Once we have built up to a modest amount of duration, we will start gradually incorporating other tasks and distractions into this behavior, such as me touching her face while she maintains the chin rest.
I’ll share more as we continue working on this behavior.
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