How to Teach Your Small Dog to Sit

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and today we’re going to talk about how to train a small dog. So let’s teach our Mi-Ki how to sit. Little Rico is learning to respond to his name. Rico, good. Now I’m going to use food as a lure to show him what I want him to do. Little puppy, Oh! the wind is blowing, it’s very exciting. Now I do not want, good boy… I don’t want to drag him back to me; I want him to come to me—and we’ll talk about that in a minute when we do the come video. Little puppy, I just want to get his attention, and I’m actually going to lure him over. So to teach him to sit, I show him the food: he’s licking, smelling, sit… good, good. Now this is an important point, because we’re talking about training small dogs, and this little Mi-Ki, Rico tends to rear up on his back legs. His mom told me about it just a few minutes ago. Little puppy… It’s very important that you not give him the food until all four… good good, all four paws are on the ground as well as his bottom. Little puppers, sit, good. That was a good demonstration right there, because I said the word sit right before his rear hit the ground, then you mark it and give him the treat. Little puppy, Rico, good… sit, good. Now if you want to teach your small dog to go up on his hind legs, you can by holding the treat up, but be sure to connect a command to that, or you’re going to get a dog that jumps a lot instead of sitting. Now a lot of people think it’s really cute for small dogs to jump, but this kind of attention demanding behavior is not very healthy for your relationship. If you haven’t already, check out the video on relationships. Sit, good. Now I’m going to try to set him up to succeed by keeping the treat low. A mistake that a lot of people make with dogs who jump like this at the treat is, they’re doing this, the dog doesn’t know what you want and they end up jumping. See, little puppy, instead keep it low, take his nose up into, ha, ha… sit, good. Now my mark there was a little slow because he sat so quickly, but still I want to give him the treat. Now Rico seems to be getting the sit pretty well. It’s important that we switch to random reinforcement now, and then start working with him in areas of different distractions. So that is how to teach a Mi-Ki how to sit. "