Let's Get EnterTRAINing! 🐾

Hello and welcome back,

Last time I spoke of the “whys” of training. How training can help your dog learn new skills and even change the way they look at the world… but only if we use positive methods to help them learn.

Today, I wanted to share with you a fun (and pretty cute!) trick that you can enjoy together. Just putting 5 minutes a day into some fun learning can really boost your connection.

The “Wave” is a great way to be able to introduce your dog to anyone who might not be very confident around dogs (especially young children) - as they can “wave” hello at a distance. It’s also a nice one for dogs who like to use their paws in the wrong way - perhaps pawing at you or doing lots of jumping up - to use their paws positively without making contact with a human. 

If you already have a “give a paw” or “high five” type of trick with your dog - then you’re halfway there, so you can skip ahead to step 5 below. 

1. Hold a treat in your hand and move it down towards your dog’s paws. Wait them out - if they nuzzle or lick your hand, ignore this, until they pick up their paw to tap your hand to try and access the treat. When they do this, click or say “yes” and then give them a treat.

2. Build up the repetitions until your dog is reliably tapping your hand with their paw every time you offer your hand with an enclosed treat in it towards them.

3. Now you can remove the treat and just offer an empty closed hand. Again, mark them when they tap your hand and then pick up a treat to reward them with.

4. Let’s next move onto offering an open hand towards your dog - first with palm out and fingers pointing down. If your dog taps your hand, mark and reward them. You’ve now got a “give a paw” behaviour! 

5. If you’ve previously used a “paw” or “high five” verbal cue for your dog tapping your hand we want to remove those words for now - and just offer our hand towards our dogs silently. Now we want to try and catch the moment that our dog lifts their paw to make contact with our hand, but before they actually tap us. So you’re marking your dog for tapping the air with a raised paw.

6. Once your dog has got the idea of this, we want to slowly start changing the position of our hand, so that eventually our fingers will be pointing upwards when we move our hand towards our dog - so it looks like a “waving” position. Again, marking your dog with a “yes” or clicker, when they raise their paw but don’t actually tap your hand.

7. Now - if you want to add a verbal cue too, such as “wave” or “hello”, you can do so. Say the word then present your hand in the upright position, wait for your dog to target the air and then reward them.

8. Finally we can start to move our hand - so we’re waving at our dog as part of the visual cue. You can also wait to reward your dog and see if they will target the air twice before getting their treat, so they too are “waving” back at you. 

If you want to see this one in action, I’ve got a quick video tutorial you can also check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6PhcQt_jO4

Hope learning this trick together brings you both some joy!

Until next time, happy training,

Caroline