Crawling- a Helpful Trick

One time I had to pass a long extension cord under my front porch.  The porch was long and fully enclosed.  I hated the thought of crawling under there with all the spiders!   Then I remembered that my dog knew how to crawl, and pull (I taught her to pull by using the pull command every time she pulled on something, to the point that she knew how to do it on command).   I then had her take the cord in her mouth and asked her to crawl.  (well, for me it was ‘crawly-crawl’!)  There was someone on the other end of the porch calling out ‘pull!’. This was quite a feat for my dog to be obeying two commands at once, but she did it!  You can imagine how proud I was of her, and how glad that I didn’t have to crawl in that dark space myself!

You can use an obstacle such as the Crawl Tunnel to teach this helpful, fun trick.  Plus, if you ever compete in a UKC trial, you’ll be ready!  The crawl tunnel is also used in K9 training to challenge the dogs to crawl through low places to get to a target location and retrieve something.  Start the roof off high, then as your dog is crawling through to the other side you can lower the roof even more.  Before long your dog will become so confident in crawling that he might voluntarily offer to crawl under your bed to retrieve your slippers!  It’s fun to train and play with- imagine the tricks it can teach? “What do you do in a fire? Crawl under the smoke. Stop! Drop! Roll!”