How to Teach a Dog to Lie Down

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 teach Shira how to lie down. We have already worked on the name game and the sit and if you have not already, please take a look at those videos before you try to teach your dog to lie down. Sit, good, very nice, Shira is a very attentive dog, so she will probably be very responsive to me, just using my body language to show her how to lie down, but I am not sure. I am going to set her up to succeed by using food as a lure first. She knows what this treat pouch means by the way, so I am going to hide it. So she knows I have food and I am actually going to lure her, take her nose to the ground, down, good. Now see how she is kind of on her honchos? That is not ideal, good. You really prefer them to be over on one hip. One reason is that when dogs are in kind of sphinx position that crouch is really easy for them to pop up it makes the stay much harder to learn. It is also prettier and more comfortable for them and more likely for them to stay when they are over one hip. Okay, I am going to try that with the food, but this time to be random we will not give it to her. She is thinking about it, down, good. Now because that took a little while, I went ahead and gave her this treat, okay. So I want to speed her up using food as a lure, so I am going to use a more palatable treat. Sit, good, so there I want to lure her back into a sit, and then take her down, good, okay. Now sit, I am going to try just using some body language with Shira and see what happens. Down, good, Oh! That must be how her daddy taught her to lie down. Okay, that is very nice, down, good. Down, good so see she is responding just to the hand signal, okay, down, good, very nice. At this point, we need to start fading the hand signal and fading the lure. If you have not already, please take a look at that video and we will move on to teach Shira how to stay in the down. "