Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and today we’re going to talk about training dogs. We’re going to teach Gloria how to lie down. Now in the last training video, when we were teaching her to sit, I discovered that her focus on me was very valuable, and I was able to actually give her attention and affection to encourage her to do the command. I’m going to do the same thing with the down command: I’m going to get her engaged and excited, get her attention away from all the distractions in this parking lot, and then be excited when she does the command—and hopefully that it will be reward enough; remember she wasn’t interested in the food. Gloria, Gloria, good, down, good girl, ump, down, good, okay. Now she was kind of slow, okay and tentative with that down, so I’m going to try to speed it up a little bit. She also got too excited and broke the down command when I got two effusive and enthusiastic, so I’m going to tone it down a little bit this time. Gloria, good, sit, good. Now there’s an important thing to point out. She was swinging her rear towards me to sit where she wanted to. This is kind of a sassy thing that huskies do. I’m not going to let her sit on my foot. I simply moved her rear-end, so her bottom goes where I want it to. There’s those husky ears again, sit down good… very nice, oh! that’s what Gloria likes, ump, I’m going to give her little help, good girl, very nice, okay, sit, good, so using some body language there, really helped her know exactly how fast and where I wanted her to sit, good, down, good, what a nice girl, what a good girl. So Gloria has learned how to lie down very nicely. This can be a hard command for huskies to do, because you’re asking him to lie motionless, huskies like to run, but if you’re patient and if this technique does not work for you, then just simply try something else. There’s plenty of videos on Expert Village with other breeds and other techniques to help you train your husky how to lie down.
