Hopefully you have had a chance to play around with the clicker training and box games to get a little experience with shaping. This week we will look at starting some of the foundation tricks that can be used to teach many behaviors. Next weekend’s classes we will play around with some of these tricks so I’m going to share with you the videos so you can get familiar with teaching these tricks. You can play with them during the week and then during class we can discuss the process and troubleshoot problems.

Pedestal Training: in the group classes you have already heard me reference pedestal training, so let’s look more at it. Why do it? It can help your dog learn better rear end awareness and coordination. It can strengthen your dog’s rear legs. It can improve heeling skills, help dogs learn to sit closer to you. Teaches pivoting skills, is a foundation for Orbit trick, helps a dog learn how to back up and do other rear leg driven tricks.

Pedestal Training is explained in more detail in the Tricks Module, click the link and scroll down to find written instructions.

Target training with a paw touch. We have done a lot of nose touch with our reactivity work, but for tricks and body mechanics we also want to work on paw touching targets. We can teach our dogs a lot more for building confidence and coordination if our dogs will touch a target with their paws and physically interact with objects.

More written instructions and details can be found in the Clicks & Tricks module.

Hold is one of the more challenging tricks to teach if your dog does not have a natural retrieve. I want to help get you started on this one early if you have a desire to teach your dogs a retrieve as it can take a bit to perfect this one. This is also in the clicks and tricks Module, all the way almost at the end, again because this is one of the more challenging tricks to teach. So hit the module and go all the way to the end for written instructions and details. The first step is to simply mark and reward any contact your dog makes with the item with their nose or mouth.

So your homework for this week is to do any of the following that interests you:

• Get your dog standing on an object with their front feet

• Click any movement with the back feet and reward with that head turned away position

• Introduce your dog to a paw touch target (if you do nose targeting use a different looking target)

• Click any paw touching of the target

• Try to remove your hand from behind the target

• Introduce your dog to an item to hold

• Click and nosing or open mouth on the object