I love taking my dog to cafes & pubs. There is nothing better than waking up on a Saturday morning, and going out for a coffee. Now that I have a dog, I hate leaving her behind! There is a great selection of dog friendly cafes in my local town, so I made it a top priority to train my puppy to be a good cafe dog. Here is all the best advice I’ve had to train my dog to settle in cafes, and things I’ve learned through trial and error.
My 7 tips to set you & your dog up for success when visiting dog friendly cafes:
- Get a settle mat
- Go for a walk first
- Practise outside
- Have endless treats
- Start small
- Practise, practise, practise
- Be patient
The most important thing is to make it as easy for your dog as possible. You don’t start training recall by standing 10 meters away from your dog. No, you start really close, and build up to longer distances. If they can master the skill at its easiest, they are more likely to succeed as it gets harder. The same rule applies here. I’ll go through each tip in more detail below.
1. Get a Settle Mat
This is something I learned about in puppy training classes. A settle mat is just a small blanket or mat that you train your dog to sit or lie down on. The purpose of a settle mat is for it to be used as a cue for your dog to sit or lie down on it, and be calm – wherever you might be. You can take it to dog friendly cafes and restaurants, to get out for your dog to lie on. It provides familiarity to your dog, to help them relax even in new environments. You can take it to family & friends houses too.
Start by getting the mat out at home, maybe putting it on the floor while you watch TV, or are eating your dinner. Throw treats onto it to make your dog want to be on their settle mat, and reward them continually for staying on the mat.
Once they are familiar with it at home, you can start taking it out and about with you. You won’t always need it – we don’t take it with us now that she is over a year old however it was great when she was a puppy. Here is my dog Honey, fast asleep on her settle mat in a hotel bar from a visit to the Tawny, a dog friendly hotel in Staffordshire. You can read about our stay here.
2. Go for a walk before visiting a dog friendly cafe
It is a good idea to take your dog for a walk before trying to head into any dog friendly cafes. It doesn’t need to be a huge walk, just 10-20 minutes. Enough to let them have a good sniff, go to the toilet, and calm down a bit. If you take them straight from the car into somewhere super exciting like a cafe, it will be much harder to get them to settle.
3. Practise Outside First
On our first cafe visit, Honey was about 11 weeks old. We sat in the outside seating area of a local cafe and had a coffee. I gave her lots of treats – practising sit and lie down. We weren’t trying to get her to settle on this first trip, but just exposing her to the new environment and letting her get used to people walking past her. As you can imagine, a cute little puppy received lots of fuss! I’m sure this will have helped create positive associations with being at a cafe.
The benefit of being outside is that it was much quieter, there isn’t the clattering kitchen sounds you sometimes get in the confined space of a cafe. Also given she wasn’t fully house trained yet, I didn’t want to risk a toilet accident inside.
When you move on to your first attempt inside a cafe, try not to go at a peak time. Basically, don’t go at 11am on weekend. The busier and louder it is, the harder it will be for your dog to focus on you.
4. Have Plenty of Treats
When I was training my dog to settle in a cafe, the most important thing was just to have plenty of treats with me. I would tell her to sit or lie down, and she would get rewarded for doing the action. Honey quickly realised – she is only going to get a treat if she is lying on the floor. This led to her lying on the floor voluntarily, and I would periodically give her treats to reinforce this positive behaviour. I would have extra special treats to distract her when people or other dogs walked past, to try and stop her jumping at them.
If you were visting somewhere around your dogs meal time, you could take their meal with you and feed it to them peice be peice instead of using treats.
In early visits, it might feel like you are giving the dog a treat every 30 seconds to stay lying down, but that won’t always be the case. You can build up to longer and longer gaps between treats as they get the hang of it.
5. Start Small, and Build Up
A puppy has a short attention span. To help them focus and engage with you while you are training them, work in short periods of time. Start with short cafe visits, just 10-15 minutes to get them familiar with the environment. Then you can build up to longer periods of time. After 6 months I could meet my friend at the cafe for an hour long chat, but I didn’t start out doing this.
6. Practise, Practise, Practise!
Everyone has heard the phrase ‘practise makes perfect’ – it applies here as well. You will probably never reach perfection – each dog is unique with their own quirks and triggers, thats why we love them. But the more you expose your dog to cafe environments, and practise settling, the easier it will become for your dog. They will learn from familiarity what you expect from them in those situations.
The more you practise, the more you will get to know your dog too, and understand their behaviours. This will help you decide where to sit, what treats to bring, and everything else to set you both up for success. For example, my dog is still not great at settling if she is near another dog – that is way too exciting for her. So I know I need to hold on to her lead extra tight, and give her more of my focus and be quick to reward with treats if there are other dogs around.
7. Be Patient
Like any skill, it will take time to perfect something that doesn’t come naturally to your dog. There will be plenty of mistakes along the way – we’ve had our fair share! Our dog has jumped up at people, knocked over drinks, spilled a bowl of water, and much more. But now that she is a year and a half old, we can confidently go to our local cafe and stay as long as we want knowing she will just lie down. So all the mistakes were worth the end result. Hopefully we have another good 10 years ahead of nice calm cafe visits!
