Basic Dog Training Online Course

Supplemental Training: Tricks

What You Will Learn:

We highly recommend you have a good start with at least the Foundation Behaviors before beginning any of the Tricks. Most likely your primary goal is to have a well-behaved and well-trained dog who will sit, down, come, stay and walk nicely on leash. We agree that the basic skills are of utmost importance before teaching lots of tricks. However, we have found that taking some breaks from sits, downs and stays and having some fun helps keep both humans and dogs interested and having fun. If you're not having fun, you're less likely to keep practicing. Taking a break to work on some fun tricks can help keep your training session for both you and your dog.

It's also important to keep challenging your dog. This is especially true of your dog learns quickly. Whether adding difficulty to what you are currently working on or teaching new things, it's important to keep our dogs challenged and learning new things to help keep them out of trouble. If you don't care about “tricks” consider whether some of these tricks might have practical purposes. For example, we teach our dogs to “shake” so that we can more easily trims nails, clean muddy feet or pull thorns from their pads.

Teaching tricks also helps keep your dog's brain active, which is beneficial long-term for brain health as dogs age.