Get the GUN! (Weekend Tricks)

WE are teaching Elsie a new trick and it is pretty cool. Only problem, you have to be the one with the gun to get her to do it... So in a real situation, this would be a failure.......

What we do is hold up a toy gun so that it is in her reach if she jumps and tells her to "GET the GUN!". Once she does, we let her have a treat. She loves to play with toy guns (pistols in particular). It is fun to teach her tricks like these and they are similar to stand (which my little brother likes to teach both Skia and Elsie).

As I have said, I have been working on three other tricks like sitting, rolling over, and lying down. Typically, to get your dog to role over, first you need to get your dog to lie down... and that was little hard. Watching videos on training, I thought lying down was very easy. But it was not so easy with Elsie. With Elsie, dropping your hand and treat to the floor made her stand first and after several practices, she will sometimes lie down... she needs to get a little better at that trick. Her other trick "lie down" related is rolling over. I hold the treat slightly out of reach and move it behind her head. (Don't do it very fast!) When she has flopped on her side, I move the treat over so she has to role over (IT MUST be SLOW, or she may lose it). Some people suggest tickling their tummies to get the dog to want to role over. I even tried this on my eight year old female German Shepherd and she did very well with it. Elsie still learns pretty fast and it is fun to see her learn to do things.

We went on another walk today and Elsie was not near so motivated (neither was I) it seemed to get going, but she and Mom and I, with Skia, made a long stretch of running towards the end. We let Elsie wander up our long driveway.

~Western Belle