Do You Believe in Magic?

If you play your training cards right, your dog might!  Believe me; your dog knows when you have a treat in your hand or in your pocket.  Your dog also knows that sitting in the kitchen is more likely to result in a food treat than sitting in the bathroom.  Experience proves it!

Your dog also knows the difference between a person with empty hands asking him to sit, and a person with a ready-to-throw ball asking him to sit.

You can baffle and amaze your dog into more reliable compliance with a bit of trickery.  Simply pre-hide food treats and toys in places that your dog wouldn’t expect them.  Place small containers of treats/kibble all around the house.  Call your dog to the bathroom, ask him to sit and surprise him with a piece of freeze dried liver.  “Wow!  Where did that come from?!”

Now, hide a tug toy or a ball behind a bush in your yard.  Call your dog to you, ask him to sit, and suddenly produce a brand new tug toy from thin air.  Seriously, your dog will think you’re a master magician!

The point here is to teach your dog that it’s worth his time to comply in all situations, even when it would seem that you have no reward to offer.  Your dog learns that it would be unwise to risk the loss of reward simply because he doesn’t smell or see it, or because you’re not in a known reward location.

As rewards continue to pop up in the strangest places and vary from food to toys to walks to petting, compliance becomes more frequent, generalized and intrinsically rewarding.  Before your dog knows it, sitting is its own reward!  And that, my friend, is when the real magic happens!