Trick training can unleash your and your dog’s creativity.
That’s right – dogs are creative too!
When you teach your dog basic cues like sit and stay and move on to more advanced skills like teaching your dog to fetch even teach your dog to drawyou’ll start noticing how your dog solves problems and acquires new skills.
You’ll also learn about her abilities and the types of skills she’s most interested in.
For example, Matilda is too young to learn fun tricks like removing soda cans from coolers or putting laundry in the dryer, but she loves any skill a shrunken-down version of a human can do.
And Cow can learn many of the same tricks as Matilda, but she lacks the focus and motivation of multi-step skills. Instead, she prefers fast-paced, one-step tricks, like her back-and-forth trick.
Start Teaching Skills – Basic Skills
Before you can make real progress with trick training, you need to be good at getting and keeping your dog’s attention.
Small, heavy-flavored foods are best. We love freeze-dried small fish and chicken breasts. You can even use a cat lick stick.
Dogs with a strong appetite for food like Matilda will do anything for a treat, but you can also use Verbal praise, toys, and even your dog’s environment Reward and motivate them.
You don’t need to practice every day or maintain a strict training schedule. Don’t be discouraged if you’re busy, disorganized, or just enjoy ad-hoc training sessions. Do your best, when you can.
teach your dog words
In fact, dogs respond better to visual cues, such as gestures, than to verbal cues, such as words. Even better – use both.
A common mistake dog parents make at first – we start repeating the cue over and over until our dog knows what it means.
The key to getting your dog to understand your little ones is to talk less while training. Give their brains time to process new words. Start with an action, then give that action a name.
For example, when you first teach “sit,” you first need to ask your dog to sit. Usually we do this by holding a treat up their nose so they have to sit down to see it.
Only once, the moment the dog sits down, do we say, “Sit!” and reward her immediately.
With practice, our dogs start to think and process differently. They connect actions they already do naturally to words we introduce into their vocabulary. This technique is a Rosetta Stone for dogs and their people.
break the trick
We don’t realize how many steps a task involves until we need to break it down for our dogs.
Suppose we want a Dogs learn to fetch.
The steps are…
- chasing toys
- pick up toys
- take the toy back
- Put the toy in your hand.
To teach fetch, we use a technique called backchaining. This is when you reverse the steps, adding another step in the sequence until your dog can go through the entire routine.
Get creative with skills training
At the grocery store, I found a very small set of basketball hoops. Within minutes of bringing it home, Matilda knew what I wanted her to do with it.She used the skills she learned from put away her toys A smaller goal to learn with her own mind and a little help from me how to play basketball.
There are countless ways to teach your dog to use everyday household objects and routines as learning opportunities.
Even the obedience-related skill of finding ways to get our dog to stop unwanted behavior works best when we turn it into a fun trick.
What if your dog learned to press buttons instead of barking when guests arrived?
Or when your dog greets you when you come home, they learn to bring you a toy instead of jumping up and ruining your clothes?
The possibilities are endless. The light in your dog’s eyes when they learn something with your help – there’s nothing like it.
she also uses her pet copywriting business Make sure to find the best pet products and services online with engaging copywriting and fun, informative blog posts.she also offers Product Description Writing Services for e-commerce companies.
As Matilda and Cow’s dog mom, she spends most of her day walking and practicing new tricks while trying to make the most of the very modest part of her bed most evenings.
You’ll also find her baking and homemade pizza, laughing, painting and shopping.
