Posts Tagged ‘train an older dog’
training an older dog.
training a mature dog is possible, but it needs to have at least some basic obedience. There is not much chance of teaching it to do tricks if it is a badly behaved dog in the first place.
The basic commands such as sit, down, heel etc, should be known by your dog before trick training starts, because this will make things so much easier later on. Once these have been mastered, you can start to build on them and your dog will soon be entertaining your friends with the following three simple tricks.
Begging.
Have your dog sit in a corner of the room with his/her back to the wall while you stand in front of him/her. The walls will back up your dog and give it the confidence that he/she won’t fall over if he/she lifts his/her front legs off the floor.
Take some small pieces of food and hold them above your dog whilst enticing him to reach up for it. Praise him/her every time it takes the food and repeat this procedure slowly making him reach higher each time.
Whilst encouraging the dog to reach up for the food, you have to make sure that he is keeping his haunches on the ground. This can be achieved by moving the food forwards over his/her head slightly making the dog shift its weight back over its hindlegs,which will teach him/her to keep its balance.
When you dog has practised the begging trick a number of times in the corner of the room, you can gradually start to move away from the wall and get you dog to do it where it has no back support. You should expect at this stage that the dog seems to go backwards in its learning, but this is perfectly normal until the dog can to master it by just using its own body weight.
Shaking hands.
There are 2 parts to this trick for your dog to learn. Both, a verbal part and a non-verbal part that work together to give the dog a prompt that you would like it to do the trick.
In the first place, your dog needs to be in a sitting position. Make a single word verbal command such as ‘shake’, and at the same time reach out with your right hand until it is only a few inches from your dog’s right leg. Your outstretched hand is the non-verbal cue.
Initially, your dog may just sit motionless unsure of what to do, so with your left hand, kindly push its right leg forwards until it rests in your right hand. Once he/she has done the trick properly, praise it so that he/she knows he/she has done what you wanted it to do.
Praise the dog every time it does it successfully and practise it many times gradually reducing the amount of left hand prompting until only the verbal and non-verbal cues are all that is needed.
The main thing about training an adult dog to do these tricks is that the dog will learn at its own pace.
Do not scold the dog when he seems not to be learning, it is always better to be patient and give him/her more encouragement.