Five Pet Tips For Cool Dog Tricks And Fun Dog Tricks

Love those cool dog tricks you see on YouTube? Want to teach your dog some fun dog tricks too? Here are five pet tips for teaching this fun stuff to your pet.

1. Practice training daily. Consistency is the key helping your pup learn. A good time to spend each day on dog tricks is about 10 to 20 minutes.
 You can do more than that if you have the time, and you have an eager attentive pet. However, if you do more, break it into two sessions. Dogs don't have the longest attention spans in the world. You want this to be fun. If it's fun, your pup will learn much faster.

2. Don't train your dog to do lots of things at one time. Most dogs respond best if you work on one task at a time. Focused training is most effective. If you do work on more than one dog trick at a time, work on only one new skill per training session.
Many tricks build on other ones, so even with one at a time, you'll make a lot of progress quickly. For example, Springer spaniel, Ducky, does a trick called "touch it.". To teach that, I first taught her, "Down." Then I taught her, "Stay." Then I taught her, "Wait." And then she learned to "Touch it." Most skills are layers of incremental progress like this.

3. Keep in mind that these tricks are about your pet, not about you. If it's not fun for your pup, don't do it.
Be responsive to your dog when teaching her. If your dog is restless or bored and wants to do something else, follow your her lead. The point of dog tricks isn't to impress anyone but to have a good time. Don't ever force your dog to do things he doesn't want to do.

4. Once your dog has mastered one of the things you're working on, don't make him or her do it over and over again. Dogs get bored just like you do. Move on to new skills. Canines like a challenge.

5. Have patience. Some things can take a lot of time to learn. If your dog doesn't catch on right away, that's okay. Work at it in small steps and celebrate the process. Reward and praise effusively when your dog makes progress. Learning new skills is hard work for a dog. Be appropriately appreciative of the efforts.

If you keep these pet tips in mind, one day your dog will be a whiz at fun dog tricks, you'll have your own cool dog tricks videos on YouTube.