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A nice, easy trick to start with is "spin" because it is pretty much a single action
behavior. And any dog can do it, within reason. Your dog can be young, old. It's not a physically
challenging thing for your dog to do. The way I'm going to start is by placing a treat
right on Walter's nose and moving it slowly around in a circle and clicking and rewarding
him for that. Then, I'm going to do a hand signal. I still have food in my hand. Then
the next step is, I'm going to cue it, click it, reward it. So again, you're going to be
watching what your dog does and rewarding it.
Spin is great for dogs of all sizes, all ages. It's not too complicated to train, so it's
a good one to get started with. Another trick that is pretty good to get started with is
the paw behavior. Some people call it "shake", I refer to it as "paw". And the way that I'm
going to get started with that with Walter, in this case I'm not going to use the clicker,
because my hands are going to be full. I'll use a verbal marker instead. I'm going to
put a treat right up to his nose. I'm going to explain something that's going to happen
before I do it. Chances are, if he can't get the treat out of my hand, he's going to try
to bat it out of my hand, so I'm going to have my other hand ready. Yes. And the minute
he brings his paw up and makes contact with my hand, I mark it. Yes. Then, I reward it.
And then, I want to fade out the food. Yes. Perfect, sweetie.
Now in shaping a behavior, Walter knows these steps pretty well, but some dogs don't raise
their paw up that much that quickly, so you want to break all of your training down into
small, achievable steps. As your dog's teacher, you want to know what the end result you're
looking for looks like, and that way you can look for any successive approximation towards
the final result. So if he had just moved his paw up a little bit, I would have rewarded
that, and then I would have looked for larger, more higher arm movements, good, until I get
that end result there. You want to break your training up into small, achievable steps,
so that you and your dog are having fun and being successful.
The greatest thing about "paw" is that once you've got that, it's pretty easy to get high
five. It's just a variation, really, in how you hold your hand. We'll just see what that
looks like. Good, let's try that again. High five. Good. Sit. Paw. Good. High five. Good.
And those are three tricks that I think are really great for getting started with your
tricks training program.