How to Teach Your Small Dog to Lie Down

Video Transcript

Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and today we’re going to talk about how to train a small dog. It’s time to teach our little Mi-Ki, our small dog, how to lie down. I haven’t worked with Rico before, but his mother reports that when she has worked with him on lying down, his back legs don’t want to stay it on the ground. That’s a common problem with small dogs, especially little ones like Mi-Ki’s. So we’re really going to focus on reinforcing can only when he’s completely down. Rico, good, good, very nice, I’m still working on the eye contact on his name. So he’s in a sit, so this is perfect. We’re going to use the food as a lure and take his nose to the ground. Now I’m holding it down, good. I’m holding it close to his body because I want to encourage him to back up and keep his bottom legs on the ground. Now I was talking there in the timing of my giving the command, and the mark was a little bit too late, about half a second. So this time I’m going to be quiet and make sure my timing is good. Get him into a sit… down. He’s cheating, good. So see it took some a little manipulation there, and I kept leading his nose with the treat in such a way that he backed up and laid completely down. Now he popped right back up again, which is not ideal, but we’ll get there, we need to get the down first, but then we’ll work on the stay. Now I’m going to try leading the treat forward. See how his back legs are popping up. We don’t want to use that technique. Move his nose backward, down, good, excellent. Now if this technique doesn’t work for your small dog, check out one of the other videos, a video on teaching a different breed how to lie down might work best for your dog.

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