How to Teach a German Shepherd to Sit

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and we’re now going to work with German Shepherds. Sophie our German Shepherd is going now to learn how to sit. Now Sophie has had a little training but it’s been a while, I’m hoping that she’s going to let me show you not only how to teach a German Shepherd how to sit but how to start fading the lure and making your reinforcement more random. So let me get her attention, Sophie good, I’ll show her the food, I want to lead her nose up into the air until her rear end hits the ground. Now see how stiff she is. This is a good demonstration because sometimes dogs get a little nervous, they get a little stiff and you just need to be a little more patient. What I’m going to do with Sophie is, use my body … to try to encourage her what to do. Now I’m getting a lot of indications here that she’s nervous. She’s starting to pant a little bit. She’s looking away. She’s moving away. I’m going to go ahead and use a little more body language and go ahead and use the command to see if that helps her out. Sophie, come here little…, oh! yeah… we’re a little scared… we’re a little nervous, sit, good, very nice, good girl. Alright, so I’m going to go on to show… how to fade the lure. Okay, now she’s responding better to just a command, sit and a little hand signal. So this time I’m not going to give her a treat, okay and then I’ll just give her a hand signal a couple of times, sit, good, very nice. Now I want her to become less dependent on the hand signal and more dependent upon a verbal command. Okay, sit, good. Now there she started to sit, the reason I moved in to her and corrected her is that she was starting to sit where she wanted to and not where I wanted her to. Go back and check out the pre-training videos on giving commands, because it’s very important that your dog does what you say when you say it. Now she may have been testing me a little bit here because she was nervous but it does not matter. This is a brilliant dog, German Shepherds are amazing with their obedience and I do expect them to be perfect. We’ll make her anxiety less if you’re very clear about exactly what you want her to do. Okay, so now I’ll just go for a verbal sit, good, excellent, that was much better, we’ve ended with a success. She sat exactly where I wanted her to, her anxiety went down and she checked in with me about the appropriateness of her sit. So this German Shepherd is well on her way to having a perfect sit. "