How to Teach a Dog Tricks

Making your dog understand commands and tricks can help it to learn obedience and good manners. Moreover, spending quality time with your pet while dog training helps to build a strong owner-dog relationship, based on trust and respect. Also taking a well-behaved dog out in public places, can be a reason of pride for any dog owner. But generally most dog owners think that teaching a dog tricks can be an intimidating task, but actually it is not so. In fact, it is extremely simple and just takes a bit of patience, love and practice.

The best way to teach your dog a trick is to make the entire training procedure a fun process by including praises and small dog treats to reward your pet for its each achievement. So without delaying, let us learn how to teach a dog tricks in a fun and easy way.

How to Teach Your Dog Tricks?

Teaching a dog tricks not only reinforce good dog behavior in it but also makes simpler to communicate with it in day-to-day life. Although there are numerous dog tricks to teach your dog, here are some basic and easy to learn tricks for all dog lovers to teach.

Sitting: One of the most basic and important trick is to make your pet learn how to sit. For this one needs to hold a dog treat in front of his/her face and then slowly raise it above. The dog will try to rest itself on the haunches and as soon as it reaches the sitting position, say 'sit' and reward the dog with the treat. More on how to train a dog to sit.

Speak: To make your dog speak or bark, you need to search an activity or game that excites it while at the same time talk to it with an upbeat tone of voice. Once your dog starts barking, say 'speak' and then reward it either by playing the game or with a treat.

Bow: In this trick the dog bows by bringing its head to the floor. For this, the dog should be in standing position and you need to hold a treat right in front of its nose. Slowly bring the treat downwards so that the dog's head should follow the treat, while its body should remain off the ground. If it lies down, keep your hand underneath your dog to keep it from lying down and continue with the trick. Once the dog is in the bow position, give it the treat after a few seconds and say 'bow'.

Shaking Hands: This is a fairly easy trick to teach where you simply need to reach your hand out and take hold of your dog's paw while saying 'hello'. After doing it twice or thrice, next time when you will say 'hello', your dog will automatically put its paw in your hand.

Kiss: This is another simple and sweet trick where your pet licks you on command. Just say 'kiss me' whenever your dog licks you or put peanut butter on your face and say 'kiss me' when it is licking the butter off.

Fetch: Most dogs learn this treat naturally where you simply throw a ball or any object you want the dog to retrieve and it fetches back to you. In case it doesn't fetch the object, throw the object and run with the dog to retrieve it. Say 'fetch' when your dog retrieves the object and then don't forget to treat it. But as your dog starts fetching objects on its own, slowly wean it off the treats by giving a treat after every three retrievals and so on. More on how to teach a dog to fetch.

Repeat the above procedures respectively for each trick as it will help the dog to understand and learn the trick. Practice these tricks for a few minutes at a time and if your dog is tired or frustrated, stop the training session and let the dog rest or have a fun play session with it. I hope the aforementioned information on how to teach a dog tricks proves to be helpful to you all.