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Easy Tricks To Teach Your Dog By John Williams
There are different methods of teaching a dog easy tricks, whether it’s a new dog learning old tricks or an old dog learning new ones.
No one way works for every dog, but one principle that does hold true, that will keep your dog ready and willing — even eager — to learn more is to keep training sessions fun and make sure that your dog is having at least half of the fun; quit before he wants to and make the last exercise one that gets him a big, happy payoff.
Keeping it Fun
When it starts being a chore or produces anxiety for your dog, he’ll lose interest, kind of like you did in that first period algebra class back in high school. Keeping it fun means leaving the old-fashioned notions of punishment for not getting it right back in the past, where it belongs. No choker corrections, no getting frustrated and thumping the nose or grousing.
When to stop
When you feel yourself starting to get to a point where you have to hold yourself back from scolding, it’s time for the training session to end, but end it on a positive note; go back to something your dog has down pat, even if it’s a simple “sit.”
Training the Trainer
Give him the cue and as soon as he’s done it, follow it up with a big reward. You’ll find you both look forward to the next session. One of the simplest ways to teach tricks is to wait for the behavior you want, mark it immediately with the command word and/or hand signal you want your dog to identify with it, and then reward the performance. Clicker training is a natural method to turn to for trick training.
“Click/treat” and then, as the lessons progress, just the click is a fast way to mark the behavior, especially if you’ve established the click as the marker by using it for more mundane behavior, like sit, down or stay. When you’re after a behavior — a trick — that requires a sequence of actions, one way to achieve this is to mark each individual act with a command and a click, then begin putting them together in the sequence and giving the sequence a command and/or hand signal.
Being Adaptable
It’s important to adapt your technique to best suit the way your dog learns, maybe teaching a sequence of two behaviors and getting that down fairly pat, adding the next, continuing on for however many different parts there are to the trick you’re trying to get him to perform.
Some dogs will do better if you teach them to do several things in a series at a time, let them learn two or three different sets of sequences, then combine them. One thing you’ll want to work on is leaving out the reward until the end of the sequence, when you will also reinforce the command for that designated sequence.
Intellidogs
If your dog expects that reward after each part you’re not going to get a smoothly executed trick.
This is one reason a clicker is so handy — you can mark/reward more quickly very little, if any, lag time and leave out the interim reward markers altogether that much sooner.
As you’re able to leave out the reward markers in the sequence, you should also be able to abandon the individual commands, perhaps even the hand signals as your dog learns to consider the sequence as one whole trick rather than a series of different ones.
You may find, too, that you have to up the ante on the rewards.
Sometimes a clever dog will decide that he’s tricking himself out of treats by not pausing in between the tricks in the sequence to give you time to reward him. Make it worth his while. Start out with relatively low value treats, even individual kibbles of something other than his regular food, then, as the trick gets longer and more involved, progress to something he likes better, that makes it worth his while to skip the lesser goodies to get the big payoff.
And always, always, make it fun, stop the session before your dog gets bored and finish up with something you can reward him for doing.
Provided By John Willaims of www.pet-super-store.com: Find the Pet Doors and Pet Ramps that you need.
