Starting the Chain: Using Foundation Behaviors to Build Service Dog Tasks and Skills with Veronica Sanchez

In this webinar, Veronica Sanchez M.Ed., CDBC, CPDT-KA, demonstrates how foundation behaviors—including nose touches, platform work, and chin rests—can be developed into complex service dog tasks and public access skills. She will explore how these foundation skills can be applied to train a wide variety of important behaviors in service dogs. Attendees will learn practical strategies for achieving true fluency and generalization, ensuring each behavior serves as a solid building block for more complex, multi-step service dog skills and tasks.

Through demonstrations, attendees will learn how to fully transfer targeting behaviors to both push-based tasks and alert behaviors, use chin rests to train precise retrieves, and apply platform work to address leash-walking challenges and train service dog tasks. Veronica will demonstrate the use of adduction to combine multiple foundation skills into longer, complex behavior chains, providing trainers with practical strategies for building precise, functional service dog skills and tasks.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how foundational behaviors—nose touches, platform work, and chin rests—can be developed into complex service dog tasks and public access skills.
• Learn practical strategies to train nose targets to fluency, fully generalize them, and transfer the behavior to other tasks.
• Explore applications of nose touches for service dog tasks, including alert behaviors and push-based tasks.
• Discover how platform work can be applied to train both service dog skills and public access behaviors.
• Learn to use platform training to troubleshoot leash walking and environmental challenges.
• Learn how to train chin rests as a targeting behavior, developing sufficient duration and precision for use in complex tasks such as precise retrieves and other service dog skills.
• Observe how multiple foundational behaviors can be combined to create longer, complex behavior chains.

Your Presenter – Veronica Sanchez M.Ed, CABC, CPDT-KA

Veronica Sanchez M.Ed, CABC, CPDT-KA is the founder of the Cooperative Paws Service Dog Coach™, an educational certification program for professional trainers in service dog training. Veronica also offers a variety of online courses on service dog training and often speaks and writes on service dogs for professional associations. She is the author of the book, Service Dog Coaching: A Guide for Pet Dog Trainers.

Veronica has a Masters degree in Education and a Bachelors in Psychology from George Mason University. She also has a Certificate in Brain Research in Education from the University of Washington. She has supported owner-trainers training service dogs for mobility, hearing, mental health, neurological problems and dual guide-mobility work. Veronica’s interest in service dogs is both personal and professional. She has a disability herself, a neurological condition called generalized dystonia, and she has trained her own dogs to assist as service dogs

PPG Members

PPG Members use your $10.00 discount coupon code at registration to access your membership rate. The code can be found in your membership area.

Not yet a member? Click here to join and begin receiving discounts on PPG member events.