teaching your Dog to cross their paws

Here is a video demonstration of shaping your dog to cross their paws

You can teach paw crossing in a few different ways. You can see me free shape it here with Emily, using clicking paw movements and reward placement to move the behavior. We can also teach this using a paw target or using our hands as a paw target to help get our dogs moving their feet in a specific manner. When using a target think about how your target movement will turn into a visual signal that can be a cue, so be aware of trying to use those movements as part of your targeting so later you don’t have to switch this. What do I mean by this? Well let’s say you want your dog to do the trick where they mirror your movements, if I am always using my left hand to target the dog to move left paw over their right, then when I switch to wanting them to mirror me, they will be focused on the wrong hand. So I might want to actually use my right hand crossed over. If I want to do this standing then maybe I want to put the target on my foot and have my dog focused on my feet. So the earlier we decide what we want the end trick to look like the easier it is to engrain those cues into the end trick.

Stage one:

Stage two of shaping a paw cross