Tricks training is a wonderful activity to participate in with you and your dog. It is both mentally and physically enriching for your dog and it improves your skills as your dogs trainer. an easy trick that you can get started with would be paw, or some people refer to that as shake and what you want to make sure you do with tricks training is keep the training fun and positive for your dog. A good recommendation I'd like to give everyone is to resist the temptation to grab whenever training any behavior - you want them to think it through and in order for them to do that you need to break it down into small achievable steps so you're not necessarily looking for the end result you're looking for anything that's moving in the direction of that. So for paw I'm not going to grab at his feet because he might not like that he's also not using his brain if I'm doing the work for him so dogs if they often cannot get something with their mouth they use their feet so I'm going to put a treat right on Jack's nose and I'm going to have my hand ready when he tries to knock them out of my hand because he can't get them with his mouth and I'm just going to wait for that - I'm going to wait for any paw movement whatsoever - he moved his left paw just a little bit so that was a nice baby step - good I got a lot of movement out of the right one - I'm going to try again - good - I say the word good every time he does the behavior correctly and slowly it seems that I will be able to shake with his paw. The repetition of hearing the word good when his paw touches my paw so he makes that association. So now I think I'm ready to take the treats away - good - he ois still going to get one but I don't necessarily want to put them up front anymore and then we can work with a little duration so he can hold it there - oh beautiful - good and now that he's doing that readily if I'd like to put a verbal que on it I'm going to be able to say - Jack - paw - good - and now I've taught my dog to give paw.
