How to Teach a Dog to Sit

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and today we are going to talk about training dogs. We are going to talk about how to teach a dog to sit. There are a couple of different ways you can go about this. Like anything else, there are many methods to teaching. I am going to go over two of the most common. One way you can teach a dog how to sit is to use your food as a lure to show them what you want. Now Shira is being a little cute dog over there, but let me try to get her attention, I am going to show her the treat, lead her nose into the air, sit, good, then give her the treat. That happened very quickly but what happened is I said the command as her rear was going to the ground and I marked it the second her bottom hit then I give my random reinforcement. Sit, good, very nice. Now as you can see Shira is a really responsive dog, so I am going to be able to show you in this video another way to teach a dog to sit and that is simply to use your body language and/or wait until the dog offers the behavior, then you can say it and mark it. Okay, sit, good, okay. Now I am going to use my body language to encourage her to do it. Sit, good. So you see just a little movement forward helps her know what I want her to do. Okay, sit, good. Now there I got a little bit of hesitation and it is because I was not giving her any signals that I wanted her to sit. So as you can see there are many different ways you can encourage your dog to sit. If you use food as a lure, you are going to have to fade that lure, be sure to check out the video in that topic. If you use your body language, you will have to fade that too, but dogs are so hyper-aware of what is going around them that that can be really helpful. Your ultimate goal is a verbal sit without any signaling. "