Training A Dog to Stay Down

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Tracy Tenner with Better Behavior Dog Training here at Extra Care Animal Hospital in Davie, Florida. We’re here on behalf of expertvillage.com and we’re going to be teaching you how to teach your dogs tricks. The next command that we’re going to talk about or trick that we’re going to talk about today is the command called “down”. Although we call it down it really means for the dog to lie down and again we’re using a small soft treat that your dog likes very much and can eat very quickly, the reason for this is so that he remembers what he got it for in the first place. When we teach down we teach it from a sitting position so we put the dog into the sit as we’ve shown previously and then we take the treat directly down to the ground in a straight line and command down and we hope that the dog's head and body follows. If he gets up we say no, sit, give him the treat back into the sitting position and once again bring him into a down position. Good, down, we give the treat low to the ground or even on the ground so that dog is getting it from the down position and not looking up for it. Also notice that the dog’s elbows were on the ground before we released the treat and praised the dog, we’ll show you one more time. From a sitting position the treat goes from the dog’s nose directly down to the ground, down and then we drop the treat on the floor so that the dog gets it from the floor and realizes that it’s coming from the down position. Treat at the dog’s nose, another way to think of this is the treat goes from the nose to the toes, nose to toes, down, when the elbows hit the ground we release the treat, good, dog, good, down. Well we hope that you’ve learned a lot about teaching your dogs tricks today and if you would like any further information you can contact us at www.extracareanimalhospital.vetsuite.com, thank you very much."