Your Favourite thing to teach a dog, and how you do it?

I can't answer this with one thing. I love to teach tricks, all tricks. I think they are great because dogs can learn them very young and because they are so much fun, it builds a strong bond with your dog. And the dog learns to enjoy learning! Which one? and Wave are really fun. In Which One, you hide a treat in one fist and the dog uses his paw to tap the hand with the treat. It's a real crowd pleaser. I have a video of that and more tricks on my page at
http://loveyourdog.com/tricks.html

Well, I liked teaching Hershey, "Shake" It was easy, I picked his paw up gently, and told him "Shake" and then praised him, and petted him, now he lets me touch his front paws. Lovely trick. (It took me three days to teach him this trick, with no treats!!) He trusts me picking his paws up now. other than his back paws, but I am going to work on it. Its really easy to teach.

Oh sorry about that Any this has probably aready been answered but...

What I did with Lizzie was I have a treat in one hand, then have the other hand on her stomach, which would stop her from sitting, so anyways, then I took the treat and slowly moved it down her legs, and then she would naturally go into the "bow" position And then just lable is, and you can make a hand signal for it too

My favorite trick by far has been teaching Cocoa to "sneeze" on command. It is absolutely adorable.

But, really I just love to train. Specially short, easy, fun behaviors such as "spin", "bow", "jump"(straight up in the air), "crawl", etc etc. And of course, my most obsessive addiction yet: agility!
I taught my rescue to bow by actually first teaching her to target to my hand. (Bop her nose to my hand.) And then I just asked her to "touch" when my hand was practically on the floor. She no knows "bow" by hand signal, adn I'm now using that "bow" to teach her 2o2o agility contacts! Haha.. creative!

I've got a question maybe soem of you can help me with. I have trouble teaching Zippy any tricks involving laying on his side. He will not let me lure him into this position and if I try to gently guide him onto his side he jumps up immediately. My other dogs were pretty easy about this. Zippy is very intense and animated during training session and just does not get the laying flat out stuff--when he is relaxed and sleepy on the couch I can sometimes guide him into that position, but I haven't figured out how to put it on cue. Any suggestions? I would love for him to learn "play dead" and "roll over" Thanks!

The best trick I ever taught was "fish out of water". I taught it to my rather wiggly pit bull Tank.

Whenever Tank rolled over on his back in play, I'd get him excited by rubbing and tickling his tummy. Just before he started squirming and kicking, I'd say "fish out of water". Then I'd reward with a treat. He learned it in a surprisingly short time.

It was so adorable. Whenever I'd say, "Tank, fish out of water!", my big red pit bull would fling himself onto his back and thrash wildly.

I haven't been able to teach that to any other of my dogs to date. They just weren't natural "wigglers". But I think I'll try with Voodoo. I bet he could do it!

My favorite thing to teach my dogs is "NO KILL"...why? its so easy

In this case, I would definitely use the capturing technique. Is he clicker savy? Read up on that first. Prime him to the clicker and then when he is already lying down that way....maybe he's resting or about to take a nap, click and treat. Be sure to catch it before he raises his head so you don't reinforce the raised head. Just wait for times that he is lying down with his head down and on his side, click-treat. Get things under way and then try adding in some instances where you lure (if he doesn't lie down a lot on his own) and if you can. Click/treat. He will, after several reps begin to associate the yummy treat with that position and will tend to repeat it for the reward. Use a high value treat and low key praise so he doesn't fling himself back up in the excitement. Once he is giving you this position, start adding a cue word (bang bang, or whatever) at the same time that he is IN the position, not before. Once you've done that for a long time and you think he's made the connection, try offering the cue before he goes all the way down. Click-treat. Don't try to get the complete down with the head down from a stand. Start out when he's down, but maybe he's got his head up. Later you can try from a sit or a stand. When he gets to the point where he is going down on cue regularily, you can eliminate the clicker. Keep treating every time for a while longer. Then you can skip a few times with the treat but still treat him sometimes. You don't want him to regress and stop offering the behavior. It still needs reinforcement on a variable reward schedule.

I encourage you to read about clicker training. It's very effective for tricks.

http://www.clickersolutions.com/articles/index.htm

The jury is still out on what my favorite thing is to teach. Maybe I don't have a favorite thing. LOL. I'll be thinking it all over.