Author: Umang Madan

When it’s time to teach recalls in my level-one puppy classes, I get everyone’s attention and say: “Now I’m going to tell you three fantastic ways of teaching your pup…” — insert pregnant pause — “…never to come to you.” Of course, everyone laughs and looks puzzled. But without meaning to, new owners screw up[...]

Introducing heeling with small dogs can present some special challenges due to the fact that it’s very uncomfortable to bend over so far in order to lure them along with a treat. This is where it’s really important to use a killer treat to help your dog target it and maintain her focus while moving.[...]

The next step in heeling is to reduce the reliance on treats. To do this, teach your dog to target the treat in your hand and maintain her focus there even when she’s not able to continually pull off bits of the treat. You can also start closing your hand more and more until the[...]

When heeling, right and left turns present some special challenges. In a perfect world, when your dog is heeling, she’s supposed to be in an imaginary box just left of your left knee. That means that even when you make a turn, your dog should never leave that imaginary box. But when turning either right[...]

Once sit, down, and stand are well established with hand signals, it’s time to move on to heeling — a very difficult exercise to do well. What’s its purpose? The most obvious is to teach your dog to walk alongside you nicely without pulling on the leash regardless of surrounding distractions. But there’s a deeper[...]

One hand signal that can hit a bit of a snag is teaching down without bending over to touch or point to the ground. That’s because, when you just lower your hand to your side to signal down, without bending over, you’re actually asking your dog to move down and away from the treat, which[...]

No Treat in the Signal Hand You should only move on to stage 3 hand signals once your dog is by and large ignoring the treat in your signal hand, since she now knows that the treat reward will be coming from the opposite, hidden hand. In stage 3, you remove the treat from your[...]

Once your dog has mastered the stage 1 hand signals, and she can move through them as readily as she did when you were luring her around by the nose in the part 1 exercises, then you’re ready to move on to stage 2 of hand-signal training. In the second stage, you introduce a little[...]