"DOWN"

“Down”

I do “down” with the boys when I get home from work, but before I feed them dinner. They seem to be more attentive when we train before dinner.

Because Guinness seems to already know “down” without a food lure or hand gesture, I’m concentrating on Basil first. We just taught Basil down last week using a food lure. When Renee was here, he didn’t know “down” without the food lure.

I put Guinness behind the baby gate and worked with Basil first.

Say “down”. Hesitate 2 seconds. Then hand gesture (food or no food lure) your fingers to the floor (don’t say “down). As soon as his belly touches the floor, say “yes!” and reward with food from the other hand.

Then throw a treat for him to get so he pops back up and walks back over. I did this with Basil maybe 12-15 times using no food lure (because we did that last week and he should know by now). I did it both sitting and standing but mostly standing since that would be ideal. Then finally, he did it without a hand gesture! When he did that, he got a jackpot of treats!

I repeated the same with Guinness except I would tell him “down” as he was walking back to me in order to get him to do down from a stand instead of a sit. Guinness is a little ahead of Basil, so he goes down immediately. He rolled over a couple of times thinking we were doing “bang”, but I just turned my back and ignored him. After 2-3 times of that, he caught himself and rolled back over and did a firm down stay. Then I took it a step further and we did down on the cold floor. Guinn would go down but pop right back up.

By day 2, Basil had it all down without hand gesture or food lure.

Next: "STAY"