Teach Your Pet Tricks the Easy Way

For the most part dogs are excited to do what their owners want and try their best to please when it comes to reaping a reward for doing so. These are dog tendencies that need to be exploited when it comes time to teach them tricks. It makes sense to work with their natural tendencies. By building on these natural ‘dog’ peculiarities and behaviors in association with rewards to generate pet tricks, the procedure becomes easier than trying to teach a trick from the ground up.

Watch what your dog does for his own enjoyment. Does he jump into the air chasing butterflies? Does he like to drag his feet while crawling on his belly? If some kind of instinctive behavior can be fostered into a clever trick, that will quicken the training process. Be ready to use a fitting hand signal and verbal command when this behavior is exhibited and then follow through with an immediate reward.

It’s important to not feed your dog an excessive number of treats. If you feed them too many you risk them either becoming sick, obese, or immune to the treat if you know what I’m saying. Treats will be good in the beginning, but you need to slowly wean your dog off of these treats so that he or she will do the tricks after seeing your hand signal or receiving the verbal command.

Most dogs don’t take very long to get the hang of it because they recognize quickly that when they do the trick they get the treat. This makes the training pretty simple, and you can use simple commands as a gateway to other tricks. One example might be using the command ‘down’ instead of ‘play dead’. This will be a good starting point, and eventually you can move on to ‘play dead’. ‘stay’, ‘come’, and ‘sit’ will also come naturally to the dog once a little bit of practice is done.

An alternative way to get your dog’s attention when developing some tricks is to utilize a favorite play toy. Using a squeaky toy or a ball your dog likes to play with, just beyond his reach, rapidly move it up and down coaxing him to jump at the same time giving him the “jump” vocal command. After repeating until he associates the command and hand signal with the trick of jumping, eliminate the toy and just use your hand and the voice command.

Exploit your dog’s perceptive sense of smell… his capability to distinguish smells close up and at long range is amazing. This incredible capability can be utilized in teaching various types of “hide-and-seek” tricks and games. Again, using a favorite plaything or chew ball, conceal it under a box or other object. Start just a few feet away and by degrees extend the distance or advance the difficulty in stages, as an example positioning the box in a different room or up on a chair.

Do you want your dog to “high five” you? A great way to teach this trick is to use your dog’s affection for you as his owner and perhaps his natural behavior of presenting you his paw. You can promote this by kneeling in front of your dog, offering your “paw” and speaking the command “shake”, “high five”, “give me five”, “five”, or any command you decide to apply. When he reacts properly, reward him with praise or a treat. He will quickly figure it out.

The dog will usually have no hesitation to hand you their paw, and because of this you will sometimes be able to do the trick without saying anything. Sometimes you might actually have to lift their paw up for them, and even if this is the case then you’ll still need to give the dog some praise so that they’ll be willing to do it on their own next time.

There are a few other things that you can expand on once you’ve taught the dog a few tricks. One thing that you can do is expand the high five into a way to make them sit up. You can do this by compelling them to raise both paws, at which point they’ll just sit up. Once you’ve gotten them to do this, make sure you give them a treat.

Of course there are many different types of training. A lot of it is for behavior manipulation, safety, proper house manners, and so forth. Developing tricks is for you and your dog’s amusement, recreation, and to help strengthen the relationship between you.