Teach Your Puppy to How to Fetch & Drop

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and today we’re going to talk about puppies. So let’s talk about how to teach your puppy how to fetch and to drop and about tug of war. Tug of war is not a good game to play with your puppy unless you always win and you create the rules around the game. It’s not a good idea to put yourself in an adversarial position with your puppy and it’s also not a good idea to let your puppy win. Tug of war also gets puppies very, very aroused and that causes them to associate you with them going off into another playing and basically ruling you out of existence. Little Barto here is trying to tug and I want to teach him how to drop the toy, now he’s letting go every once in a while and you can drop, drop you can just say the word as he let’s go. Another thing you can do is simply say drop, as you pull the toy out of the mouth. One thing that I find very… give, good very effective is to actually trade the object for a treat, as you can see it’s very effective. Drop. Good. So there I was able to get him to drop and trade the toy for something else. Now it’s also very important when you’re working on drop that you let the puppy have the toy again, that’s much of a reward for dropping as the treat. Also you can teach your puppy to fetch this way, don’t start in the backyard where there are squirrels and birds, start inside with low levels of distraction and just throw the toy a few feet away. So here I’m going to get him excited and running to go after the toy, fetch, good boy, when the puppy brings the object back to you be sure to throw it again. That’s as much a reward for fetching as a treat can be. Drop. Good boy. So I’m going to reward him by letting him have the toy again. So corgi are not natural retrievers. The little Barto here will learn how to fetch. Right little puppy. "