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too much for the moment. It’s important to keep your training sessions varied and short. Work on teaching a new trick alongside practicing a trick your dog has successfully mastered, and always be sure to end each training session on a positive note—create an opportunity for your dog to be successful, even if that means having to lower the criteria of what you are asking for. Keep your training sessions short and sweet. A few short (under-five-minute) training sessions a few times a day will be more effective than one forty-five-minute training session.

      HINT: If your dog isn’t consistently successful in your training sessions, it’s probably because you are asking for too much too soon. Slow down, make the criteria easier, and then slowly build up to the full behavior that you are trying to achieve.

      Ways of Training

      There are a variety of techniques we will be utilizing to support your dog in understanding the tricks we want to teach them. When our dogs are first learning a trick or skill, this is how we will show them what we want them to do, or communicate to them what we want them to do.

      Luring

      This is pretty much what it sounds like: we will be using treats to lure or maneuver our dog into the desired position. Luring is a fast and easy way to teach a lot of tricks, because we are able to use treats to lead them to a behavior or position that we want. So, for example, your dog’s nose follows the treat, the body follows, and your dog ends up in the position you want—say “sit,” for example. You click and/or praise and give your dog the treat. As your dog gets more comfortable with the behavior, you are able to phase out the physical lure.

      Shaping

      With shaping, your dog is actually getting to put together the pieces of the trick without your prompting or leading. Shaping easily goes hand in hand with clicker training (though you can also use a verbal marker). With shaping, you are clicking or marking very small incremental behavioral changes while engaging with an object. The exciting thing about shaping as a training methodology is that your dog is actively thinking and puzzling out the behavior, which can be very rewarding, empowering, and confidence-building for them, creating a training conversation between you and your dog. An example of what this would look like is: if you wanted to teach your dog to push a ball with their nose, you might take out a beach ball and have a clicker (or be ready with a verbal marker your dog is familiar with, like “yes”) and a lot of treats. To start, you will click and treat for any movement toward the ball, then click and treat for sniffing at the ball. If your dog paws at the ball, you would just ignore that, and then when the dog sniffs the ball hard enough to push it, you would click, praise, and jackpot, giving lots of treats. Your dog is essentially puzzling out what kind of engagement with the ball gets the reward, and will offer more of the behaviors that are getting rewarded, thus creating the finished trick, to which you can then add a verbal cue.

      Capturing

      This isn’t always the fastest way to teach a trick, but it is a really fun process, and can be extremely effective for teaching tricks that are physically subtle (like head tilts, shaking, licking, leg lifting, etc.). To teach a trick via capturing, you will be clicking and/or verbally marking something your dog does, each time you see them do it. So, for example, if you want to teach your dog to shake on cue, each time you see them shake off after waking up or coming in from the rain, you will click, praise, and treat, and begin adding in a verbal marker, like “shake.” With time and repetition, your dog will begin to figure out that they are being rewarded for shaking their body and that the verbal marker you have attached to it—“shake” in this example—will become your cue to ask your dog to perform the behavior at any time.

      Signals

      As we get into the trick training, we will be using both verbal and physical cues or signals to our dogs to indicate what trick we want them to be doing. These signals are the way our dogs know what tricks we want them to do. Here’s an overview of how we will be communicating with our dogs as we teach them tricks.

      1.Just like it sounds, a verbal signal is a word that we have taught our dogs to associate with a specific trick or physical behavior we want them to do.

      2.With physical signals, which are often, though not always, hand signals, your dog associates the physical cue with the trick you want them to do. Dogs are extremely attuned to our body language, and so are very responsive to physical cues, alone or paired with verbal signals. Dogs are consistently watching our bodies, so they often take very quickly to physical cues. For tricks taught via luring, the physical cue can often be a less exaggerated form of the way you initially lured the behavior, something your dog will already be familiar with at that point.

      Building Duration

      With some tricks, we want our dog to perform the behavior and keep moving by, say, weaving between our legs while we walk—we don’t want them to stop because we would then probably trip over them and fall! Not fun! With other tricks, like “sit,” you might want your dog to stay in position until you tell them to do something else or release them. It’s very easy to build duration in your tricks by continuing to reward behavior in position (by treating while they stay), and then, when your dog is familiar with the behavior, upping the criteria before you reward. This means increasing the amount of time between your dog getting into position and your click/reward, and then adding in a release word.

      A release word or cue is something that communicates to your dog that a stationary behavior has finished and they can move. An example of this would be a verbal cue to release your dog from a sit or a down they have been holding. You can use this release word in trick training and in everyday life (trick training is of course part of our daily life with our dogs), so if you have asked your dog to stay, you want to clearly communicate to them when they can move. By building duration skills into our dogs’ training vocabulary, we can also communicate to them our expectation that, when performing a stationary trick (like sit, down, bow, or beg), they should hold that trick until released.

      To build duration, you will need to pick a word you want to use for release. I like to pick something that isn’t a part of my general vocabulary, so that I don’t inadvertently cue my dog to move when they are in a stay, or at another time when I don’t mean to. “Okay” and “Break” are common release words. I like to do a little extra and tend to have a flair for being a bit more eccentric in my dog training, so I use words/phrases with my own dogs that are a bit unusual. I also like to have a different release word for each of my dogs, so that I can release each one individually while the other dogs hold position. This is handy when I have the dogs all doing tricks at the same time, and in real life with three dogs, when for example I want to release one dog at a time from a stay to get meals, or from their crates. I like to find words that fit my dog’s personalities or somehow connect to their names. Mercury’s release word is “Blast-Off,” Charlotte’s is “Mosey,” and Sirius’s is “Apparate” (yes, the Harry Potter spell). Come up with a release word that you like and then, to get your dog familiar with it, start when they are lying down on their own—take out a treat, and toss it. As your dog gets up to follow the treat, say your release word in a happy voice, praise, and let your dog get the treat. Repeat a few times. The goal is for your dog to understand that the release word is a cue to move. After a few practice sessions with throwing the treat, get your dog’s attention and say the release word. When your dog gets up, toss several treats, give lots of praise, have a little party!

      Treats

      Treats are one of the most important parts of the trick training we are going to do. To support the learning process, and to reward the work your dog is doing, you want to have an abundance of treats that are motivating to them.

      When starting to train, a lot of people want to know when they can stop giving their dogs treats as part of trick training. My simple answer is NEVER! Do you want to work for free? But that isn’t actually true. You will, as your dog gains confidence and familiarity with tricks, be able to start to phase out the need to, for example, lure your dog into the trick. You will begin asking your dog to execute a particular trick perhaps even without food in your hand. Your treats might be sitting next to you, or in a treat pouch attached to your waistband. I know, I know, not the sexiest look, but hey, I’ve been seeing fanny packs making a comeback in NYC and gracing fashion

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