FE160: It's All Tricks!
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Course Details
In our opinion, dog training really is "all tricks." There's no distinction between "serious" work and "fun" work. It's all fun if you're doing it right!
Teaching tricks can, however, lead to huge and long-lasting benefits for your competition work. Far from being silly and inconsequential, tricks can be the building blocks for more advanced work. Trick training helps you form a strong and mutually enjoyable working relationship with your dog. Teaching tricks gives you valuable training experience by allowing you to practice a variety of techniques (shaping, luring and targeting), develop a training plan for a behavior from start to finish, improve your timing, and set criteria appropriately. And most importantly, trick training is just plain fun!
The tricks we will focus on in this class will have application to competition training and showing. Left and right spins, hand touches, backing up, weaving between your legs, sitting up, paw touches, chin rest, take a nap, go to bed, and play dead are some of the tricks we will work on. In addition to teaching these tricks, we will talk about how they can help improve your dog's focus, lower his stress level, and make teaching competition behaviors much easier.
Students will work at their own level and pace. If your dog already knows the basic trick behavior, we will add more challenges by working on distraction and stimulus control. There are also an infinite number of variations to each trick. Although this course is appropriate for dogs of all ages (puppies through seniors), and at all levels of training, please carefully consider your dog's physical and mental state awhen choosing and training tricks.
Here's a trailer showing some of the tricks we'll be working on:
Syllabus
For this class we have divided tricks into 5 major categories. Within each category are a variety of tricks at different levels of difficulty. We have indicated when a trick is considered foundation for more advanced tricks.
In addition to instructions and demonstration videos for the tricks you will also receive a series of "how to" lesson plans to help you develop training plans, get behaviors to happen, troubleshoot problems, move to partial reinforcement, and add verbal cues.
Down Tricks:
Go to bed (foundation)
Play dead (foundation)
Frog
Crawl
Roll over
Front Paw Tricks:
Sit up (foundation)
Paw touch (foundation)
Wave
High 5
Hug
Back Paw Tricks:
Two on / two off (foundation)
Back up (foundation)
Back up stairs
Pawstand
Tilt
Back thru legs
Head Tricks:
Chin rest (foundation)
Take a nap
Speak!
Head on lap/leg/foot
Retrieve
Pick up your toys
Ring stack
Spin Tricks:
Left & right spins (foundation)
Perch work (foundation)
Go around (fly or wrap)
Leg weaves
Prerequisites & Supplies
To get the most out of this class it will be very helpful to have some experience with clicker training and shaping. A food motivated dog is ideal. Dogs that train mainly for toys and play can certainly participate and learn tricks, but their progress is typically slower.
Once you have decided on specific tricks you may then need to acquire props. Many props are things you probably already have around the house. Most others are cheap and easy to obtain.
Sample Lecture
DOWN TRICKS
This category of tricks involves your dog putting his body on the ground in some form.
Go to Bed (Foundation):
This is an extension of mat work that many of you likely taught your pups and young dogs.The mat (bed) becomes a target to send the dog to.The sending away is the central part of this trick.You want to increase distance to the mat carefully over a large number of repetitions.
If you haven’t done any mat work before start here.These are long as they are real time progressions with a puppy:
If you already have a basic mat behavior, then start adding distance:
Play Dead (Foundation):
Play Dead can take on many unique forms.It seems many dogs have their own individual flair to this trick.The goal is for your dog to lie either on his side perfectly still or upside down on his back.Lack of movement is the vital aspect of this trick.
With a lure:
On cue:
Frog:
The frog trick involves your dog kicking his legs straight out behind him while he is on his stomach in a down position.Some pups and dogs do this naturally.The easiest way to start this trick is to lure your dog over a cushion or large pillow so that he stretches over it.This will lead to the correct positioning.
Using a medium sized pillow to encourage her back legs to stretch out.
Close to a finished version.
On cue.Discriminating between down, take a nap, and frog:
Crawl:
In a down position your dog crawls or creeps forward, remaining on the ground.Getting your dog to move forward while keeping his body on the ground, is the challenge here. Luring or targeting typically works well for this trick as long as you move your hand or the target forward slowly and carefully.
Crawl to a hand touch:
Adding distance to the crawl:
An advanced variation on crawl.Crawling along in heel position:
Roll Over:
From a down position your dog rotates his body one complete revolution.Once you have taught ‘Play Dead’ this is simply a continuation of the movement.
In this video we are using a combination of shaping and luring.We are also lumping a bit too much.Luckily for us, Star gets it anyways!
Here are some more typical progressions, still using luring to start:
Instructor
Deb Jones
Faculty
Deborah Jones, Ph.D. (she/her) is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. She taught a variety of psychology courses at Kent State University for the past 20 years. Deb has been training dogs for performance events for the past 25 years and was an early...