How to Train an Italian Setter to Sit on Command

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and we’re going to work with a Bracco Italiano, also known as an Italian setter. We’re trying to teach this Bracco Italiano how to sit. Now in the first video we discovered that she didn’t like my yummy treats. So I pulled out the big guns and I got some cheese. We’re going to try the cheese, and if that doesn’t work we’ll try a different type of motivator. If you haven’t already, check out the pre-training videos on motivators, especially if you have a dog, that’s not food motivated. Bella, good, so I’m just going to try the cheese first. Oops! She is taking it. Alright we have success. But I have my squeaky hedgehog in reserve just in case. So I’m going to use a little body language, sit, good, very nice. Oops! She spit the cheese out. Okay, good girl, sit, now… good, good girl, good girl. Now Bella is a really physical dog, she’s been bumping into me a lot and using her rear to kind of try to push me, so that’s why I’m using so much body language. If this method does not work for your dog, please check out a different breed video on how to teach a dog to sit, because not all dogs respond to all of these physical cues. Okay, so I’m going to even… see that little bump, now someone’s getting into a car, so I don’t want to tell her to sit right now, it’s too distracting. What I’ll do is get her attention with some cheese, I lost my cheese, good, sit, good, so see I’m still using some body language and she’s responding much more quickly than she did it first. Okay, so little… bumping her out of the way, sit, good, very nice. So see I get a little bit faster every time. So what I want to do now with this Bracco Italiano is start making my treat reinforcement random and start using some other forms of reward, like this squeaky hedgehog, sit, okay. "