Cooperative care introduces alternative handling methods that avoid restraint and reduce stress during routine care. These methods can be helpful during vet visits or even at home for cleaning ears, trimming nails, and giving your pets medication!

What is Cooperative Care?

Cooperative care, or consent-based training, is a method that teaches pets to perform a specific behavior only when they feel comfortable enough to consent. These methods help the pet become an active participant in their care and make care less stressful for the pet. There are different types of cooperative care that help pets communicate with us.

• Targeting: Training a pet to touch something specific with a body part or the whole body. This makes the moves predictable for the pets.
• Stationing: Teaching a pet to go to a specific place where they feel secure during procedures. This is typically on a mat or bed.
• Chin Rest Training: Teaching a pet to rest their chin on an object for a set amount of time, and stopping the procedure whenever they lift their head away from the rest site. This allows the pet to communicate when they are uncomfortable, so the team can stop, adjust, and give the pet a break.

Understanding how pets learn is important in any form of training. For this training, we want to focus on positive reinforcement (adding something to increase the likelihood of a behavior) and, occasionally, negative punishment (removing something to decrease the likelihood of a behavior). Negative reinforcement and positive punishment can increase fear, anxiety, and stress, which would not be conducive to the learning process with cooperative care.

Getting Started

1. While the pet is standing, use a lure (food, toy) to get them to extend their head/nose over the target area
2. Say “yes” or click to mark the behavior and immediately follow with a reward
3. If they move away or sit/lie down, reset by tossing a treat away and having the pet come back to try again
4. Continue shaping behavior to get the pet to rest their chin on the target, working up to longer intervals
5. Begin to fade the lure by not always having a treat or toy in your hand over the target area. The goal is not to always need your hands in view to still achieve the chin rest.
6. After consistently performing the chin rest, begin to work on increasing the duration and varying the duration as the pet develops more confidence
7. This is where consent training begins! Start by showing your hand, then gently rest it on a non-sensitive area of the pet, and reward the pet for not moving away. Be sure to mark behavior with a “yes” or clicker each time before rewarding.
8. Begin gradually introducing hand movement and touching more sensitive areas, without removing your hand from the pet, so they know what to expect.

Cooperative care training can be fun and rewarding for both you and your pet. These training methods strengthen the human-animal bond and make pet visits and routine care go more smoothly and less stressful. This is something you can do at home with your pet to get them comfortable with the motions. It sometimes takes just one bad repetition to damage the trust you’re building, so remember to take it slow and go at the pet’s pace to improve the pet’s experience and overall stress levels.