Instead of making the bed or mat a punishment for your puppy, there is value in teaching your puppy to love going on its mat or bed. This effort will have a lot of benefits in the future.

The obvious ones are:

Sending your puppy to its mat when someone rings your doorbell.
When you are having a meal and don’t want your puppy begging.
Sending your puppy to lie calmly on its bed while you watch TV.

You can also use this behaviour later in your training to teach your puppy to wait/stay and respond to commands from a distance.

I like to use the raised bed for this exercise as it better defines the boundaries to the puppy.

The puppy should regard being on the mat as a place of value, so to reinforce this rewards should not be given from your hand, the rewards should be placed on the mat.

Do not forget that we are starting with baby steps.

Initially click as soon as your puppy has at least one paw on the mat and throw the reward on the mat.

For puppies that struggle with the exercise, you can even click if your puppy simply looks at the mat. Then place the reward on the mat, and then click when the puppy has one paw on the mat. Increase the difficulty until the puppy understands that it needs to have 4 paws on the mat.

When your puppy starts liking the mat, add the words “On your mat” when the puppy is on the mat or is on its way to the mat, so it associates the action with the words. When you think your puppy has understood, you can use the words as a command.

Remember:

• You need to change your position as you want the puppy to understand that being on the mat is what is important, not its position relative to you.
• You should be able to send the puppy to the mat by increasing the distance between the puppy and yourself.
• With time, you should be able to walk around the mat and your puppy should stay on it.
• Give a release command when you want the pup to leave the mat.

Once your puppy has reached the mat you can give the sit command.

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