We are using spin as an example on how to teach a treat in the video and instructions on this page. You can use the same process shown here for many different tricks you want to teach your dog. If you have a trick in mind and aren’t sure where to start please ask in class. Our instructors are happy to help!
How to teach:
- Have your treats and a clicker ready.
- With a treat in your hand, lure your dog in a circle. Click when she’s turned her body ~3/4 of the way around the circle and is heading back towards you. Feed back at you.
- Once your dog is consistently following the lure with a treat in your hand, lure your dog in the wide circle with an empty hand. Continuing to click when your dog is ~3/4 of the way around and feed back at you.
- Start fading hand lure by making the circle with your hand smaller.
- Make sure you are still getting behavior. If you fade the lure and your dog doesn’t do the behavior correctly, then your dog is just letting you know you made the lure too small too quickly.
- Once you have small hand signal, add the verbal cue. Say the name “spin”, then do the hand lure, click and treat.
- After some repetition of the new cue/old cue your dog will start to anticipate spin on verbal cue which will allow you to fade the hand signal all together