tricks

Aside from our competitive sports, our dogs also learn many tricks. These are fun to teach and give the dogs a nice break from the daily grind of obedience and agility! I like to teach many different kinds of tricks, both simple and complex as it gets the dogs thinking! The dogs love learning tricks and it allows me to always have something new to teach the dogs, which of course they thrive on!

To teach my dogs the new tricks I rely heavily on clicker training as I find this is the best method to teach complex tricks (or tricks of any kind). It really helps you communicate effectively to your dog and I carry this over to all of our disciplines.

Another method we try is called 'free shaping' whereby the dogs are not given any indicators on what I expect them to do and they have to 'guess'. This leads to them offering a wide variety of behaviours as well as getting them to *really* use their brains.

One day, when we have more time, i'd like to use these tricks in canine freestyle (yet another venture to try out), but for the time being we are just happy to learn them and play around! Perhaps we will give Flyball a try one day also?!