Training is really good for keeping your dog's brain active and strengthening the bond between dog and handler. Once you've gone beyond basic obedience, tricks are a fun way to continue training. It may seem counterintuitive, but if your dog barks constantly, teaching him to speak on command is an effective way to teach him that barking constantly is not acceptable and it should be done on command.
In this video, you'll learn how to teach a dog to speak in 2 minutes.
Here's the transcript.
"Hi, it's April and this webisode is how to train your buddy to speak. So, this is B-Dawg and I'd like to to show you how we trained our little buddy B-Dawg here to speak. Now before I start, I want to tell you that there's a few things we use to encourage the buddies to speak. Sometimes they want to play with a toy or sometimes they come out first thing in the morning, they're very excited to see us and awake and they'll start to speak. And you can reinforce it called 'capturing the behavior.' In this case, I want you to remember that if you train your little buddy to speak, they might speak all the time. So make sure it's a behavior you want them to have on cue. In this case on the Buddies set we must do it.
"So what I want to do is put my buddy down, get a little treat, make sure I have his attention, always staying with positive reinforcement - very good, stay. Now we'll use on the set a hand cue as well as a verbal cue we use a little hiss - stay - sss, speak - good! Good speak. Good - stay - speak - good - speak - good! We give him a treat, positive reinforcement, I'm going to keep his attention. Sit, sit, good, speak - good! Stay - good!
"The hand signal for speak is take your hand like this and just wiggl it back and forth and we might make a sss sound and it kind of promotes the dog to speak. So this is the hand signal for speak. (Note: to see the hand signal, watch the video at the 1:33 mark.)
"Happy training! Remember to always use positive reinforcement and to keep your sessions short, but repeat them several times a day."
This is a simple trick you can easily teach your dog with practice. Add it to your repertoire of fun tricks and things your dog can do to earn treats. Thanks to April Mackin and Disney for sharing their on-set secrets for how to teach a dog to speak.
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