How to Increase a Dog's Vocabulary

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about teaching your dog more vocabulary, increasing their vocabulary. Remember in all cases your dog already knows how to do things like sit and lie down. All you're doing is attaching a name, a word to it and hopefully a physical cue since dogs tend to look more for physical cues. So one way to do that pretty easily would be to join a group class in your area, and I always recommend positive reinforcement training because it helps the dog look for and offer more behaviors like lying down or doing something more difficult like barking on command or doing another special position that gives you more opportunity to name different things. So - and then you're going to do - you have a couple of different options to name things, you can capture the behavior which would be working with positive reinforcement and a click or some other mark for behavior. Shape of behavior you can ask for a little more and more and more at a time for example if you want your dog to spin around in a circle, you might initially start asking for the them just to turn their head. You just reward any turn of the head and then the harder they turn their head and eventually all the way around, that's called shaping. You can also lure a behavior. You can take a treat. This is commonly used to get a dog to lie down. You take the treat from their nose and along the floor, dogs tend to lie down. That would be called luring. And then you can place the dog into position. You can pull their legs out gently and help them lie down. The most effective way of naming a behavior and the quickest way of adding vocabulary for your dog for me has always been capturing the behavior. Good. Foot. Good. Foot. Good. Spin. Good. Flip. Boy. Good. Bow. Good."