April Showers
April is here, showers and tricks and all! Tell us about the best trick your dog has ever pulled (trained, or untrained) for a chance to win an aqua hurdle in the correct size for your dog (8”, 16”, or 24”).
Agility is rarely called off for rain (as anyone who watched or attended the AKC Invitational 2009 knows), and dogs need to learn how to work in mud, rain, and wet obstacles. Practice so you’re not caught flat-footed! All Affordable Agilitys’ water obstacles are great for getting your dog used to rain-training without the rain!
The winner will be selected by a random number generator, and notified via email (providing you are a registered user here). Deadline is April 23rd. Good luck and have fun!
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How to enter this contest:
- If you have never done so before, you must first register your email address on this blog. We will then notify you if you are a winner of this contest. You only need to do this once, and you will be good for all future monthly contests (and get priority notification of when they occur)!
- Scroll to the bottom of this page and enter your comment/answer. Or, if there is no box, click on the “comments” in the upper right corner.
The best trick that my Golden’s Knute & Daffy have learned to do is look left & right on comand. Knute does it all the time. Even when I just point my finger like an arrow left or right without words.
Dorrie Wright
Well we know Caper loves the water obstacles since he was your demo dog for them. His preferred state of being is being wet.
This may be late but just had to share! Our Wheaten Terrier, his name is Festus (after the Gunsmoke character) had two tricks his just started doing. We take Festus everywhere with us since he was just a pup. My daughter would always shout “shotgun” when we would go to the car. Festus and she would both climb in the front passenger seat. One day, I went out to the car without my daughter but had Festus with me. I said “shotgun” to him and he went around to the front passenger door and waited for me to come open the door for him. Ever since that day, he will go to any front passenger door if you tell him “shotgun”! Another self taught trick is a group hug. My daughter and my sister do a lot of group hugs and say group hug when we do it. Festus, obviously being super observant, caught on to this real quick. When we say group hug, he is right there (on his hind legs) getting in the group hug action and thrilled to be sourrounded by girls!! The only time he really acts like a dog in on the agility course! 🙂 Just think, when we first got our Wheatie people told us they were untrainable and he would never be able to do the agility course…POO-POO on those people!!!! Our Festus ROCKS the hagility course and IS trainable with little effort!!!! Go Wheaties!!
My papillon loves to jump on my back and ride on my shoulders. When I am tying my shoes he jumps on. Silly trick.
Ah, the best tricks are the ones we don’t teach, huh???? I guess that honor would go to my now 14 year old girl, who tripped me up at the last jump on our run because my trainer told me to “try a front cross”…(that girl was WAY too fast for me) She looked back at me and STILL took that last jump to Q from her new, “ground signal” that I invented, right there on the spot!
Now I’m back at it with a new dog, and I just may train the “Momma’s on the ground…go!” cue from the start!
I am a lazy “trick” trainer. If my labs do something that I like I reinforce the behavior and put it on cue. IE: We were at a friends and I noticed my 2 year old lab eying a box of tissues on their coffee table. I knew he was going for it so I faked a sneeze and sure enough he pulled out a tissue and brought it to me. They were astonished that I hadn’t ‘trained” until that moment.
What I had trained was bring me things rather then chewing them up.
Heidi Ho, my minature Schnauzer loves to have a treat during the afternoon time or before bed, and if she doesn’t get it she comes to me stands up on her back legs and put her paws on my hand then walks backwards to guide me to the treat basket. Heidi Ho is our special girl.
My border collie Jake loves doing high-fives, to the point where if you ignore his attempts he will sit on his hind legs and wave both paws in the air until you finally give in and touch his paws. Then, he’s off like the wind again to find something to herd =)
My dog will go to the front door and ring the bell to be let out; then run into the garage to the recycle bin and get a soda can from the bin; come in the house with you and wait for you to ask him for a trade. Soda can for a treat, now I think he’s finally got us trained…
I was wanting my lab Annie to get some “practice” swimming and retrieving a dead fowl trainer in a friends pond. My friend, who had two golden retrievers, threw the “duck” way out into the pond. Her goldens jumped in first, heading towards the duck. Annie then jumped in and headed for the duck as well. My 45 pound lab mix Rosie (who didn’t like swimming before) was not going to let the other dogs get that “toy.” She jumped in, passed all three retrievers, grabbed the duck, and swam back to shore, leaving the retrievers in her wake!
My dog had been to the vet and still had medical tape on her leg that had been taped during her visit. When I got home I tried to remove it but she had made up her mind that she would not allow it by warning me with a growl. I decided that after a couple of days and several tries that I would try to bribe her with a large edible nylabone. I let her smell the bone and tried to take the tape off but she wouldn’t give and neither would I give her the bone. After we went thru this a few times she decided that she really wanted that bone so she started pulling on the tape until she pulled parts of it off a little at a time until all of the tape was off. I was so amazed that she knew that she wasn’t getting the bone until the tape was off but still didn’t want me to remove it that she removed it herself to get the bone. Oh, she has very long fur and I am sure she knew it would hurt if I tried removing it.
Anna, my JRT, loves to chase her CUZ balls, of which I must have several on hand at all times. When the squeakers wear out, she takes them into her wading pool and squishes them in the water. They make a satifying noise and fill up with water. She will then run around squirting that water all over the place.
Wait! that’s not best trick yet!
We were playing ball and after several retrieves she was getting quite overheated. I held up the ball and told her “This is the last time. You need to go to the “waters” and cool off.” Sure enough, I threw the ball one more time, she caught it in the air and ran to the other side of the yard to lay down in the “waters” and cool off, happily squishing the ball.
Bailey Jubilee my smooth collie did a cute trick several years ago. We were doing a agility and obedience demonstration for school age children. The kids were lined up in a straight line in front of us as we were getting ready to leave. The thought was as we walked by each student could pet Bailey and say good bye to her. Bailey being the agility dog had other ideas. Instead of walking down the row in heel postion with me she treated the 21 students as weave poles and weaved in and out of them to the very end. The students loved it and Bailey had to do the same trick several times for them.
That has to be one of the best proofing of weave poles I have ever witnessed.
When Mom says “Avon Calling”….I run to the door and ring the bell!
@Dawg, that reminds me of the “trick” Paxton did at the recent Lollypop Telethon fundraiser. We’ve been working on “pick up your toys” at home and I decided to transfer that to taking donations from spectators and putting it in the donation jar. He did this a few times and then one guy took out a wad of bills from his pocket. There was a $10 on the outside of the roll, but he opened it and removed a $1. Paxton and the rest of the spectators watched with great interest. Then the man tried to hand the $1 to Paxton who continued to stare at the pocket where the man had returned the wad of cash. Everyone started laughing and chanting “give him the $10!” (Only I knew that what Paxton was really hoping was that there were also TREATS in that pocket as there so often are with dog people – did I mention he’s a Lab? 😉
When we would come home from work, our dog Tiger would be at the gate on the east side of the house jumping up and down, excited to see us. Our neighbor told us that every morning after we left, he would get out of the yard by going under the fence on the west side of the house. At 5 o’clock, he would come home, go back in the yard, and run to the gate on the east side to greet us as if he had been waiting for us all day.
The best trick that my dog Pixelle did was to include a special trick for a St. Patrick’s day dog trick competition. Like most dogs she does tricks (begging, talk to the paw, and even does karate on cue), but nothing that would seem special for a day of wearing of the green. I decided that Pixelle should learn how to ‘kiss the Blarney stone’. While Pixelle kissed the Blarney stone perfectly (a rock painted with a shamrock) , alas the trick didn’t earn Pixelle a prize. As the crowd was pretty young, I don’t think most people even knew what a Blarney stone was. Still, I was proud of her.
PS if i don’t have a dollar bill she’ll do credit cards and/or wallets 😉 😛 lol The funniest thing associated with this was when a friend jokingly decided to give Autumn a dollar bill. Thinking she would eat it or something. Instead Autumn takes it from him and starts to trot off….like she thought she could go hit up the store now that she had money!!! 😀 The look on my friend’s face was priceless!!!!! His jaw completely dropped wide open!! lol We now joke that it’s a good thing he didn’t give her a larger amount 😉 😛
I’m tryin to think of the “best” trick. It’s a toss between answering the phone (and some time hangs up on the person) and the local holistic petstore. I think it’s the knowing the local hollistic pet store. Anywhere within 20-30 blocks Autumn knows the roads. She’ll be in her crate or in her seatbelt and be dancing back and forth. Her head will go on either side of the drivers head. She’ll chortle, whine, cry, moan, groan, etc. When we arrive she’s beyond herself. I give her a dollar bill (about how much her treat costs) and she goes running to the front door, sits, waits until they open the door. When they open the door she flies in, launches her front feet onto the counter, spits out the dollar and goes to her treat aisle. Autumn will allow you to choose the treat, but only if you hurry! She just stands there and wiggles going hey! here! here’s where my treat is!!!!! If I get extra treats for later she’ll carry the bag out to the car. Never eats the bag. Just holds it and wiggles til you take it. Autumn is a service dog for me, from a rescue, does agility and demos. This was pretty much self taught! 😀
As I’m sure everyone knows, Shelties love to bark & herd. That being said, my Bernie runs like the wind to chase anything with legs or wings. He is sooo smart that when he wants to surprise something he will not bark when running to it. This was not taught by me.I will say most times he does bark, & bark & bark.
My Aussie, Zosia, is a therapy dog. On command she pushes the automatic buttons at the hospitals where she works so the glass doors will open.
Best trick ever is definitely the “pick up the trash” trick where both of my dogs will go over to a pile of papers and pick them up and put them into a trash can. It took many hours of shaping to get this one to work. Despite such an awesome trick my house cleaning remains a battle. For some strange reason I can’t seem to get them to pick up their own dog toys or wipe their muddy paws!
My sheltie, William, loves to do tricks and can put on quite a performance for the customers who come into my feed store. People often ask how I taught him all his tricks. Most of them are easily explained and can be replicated except for one: “dead dog,” where he lies flat on his side, head down, legs straight out. He likes to sleep that way (I had to get him a large crate when he was a puppy so he could go to sleep in his favorite position) so whenever I passed him I’d give him a treat as I said “dead dog.” It did not take him long to figure it out!
We do “high-five” exercises for Paxton’s shoulders and one day I was getting bored, left, right, left, right, so reminiscing back to grade school, I tossed in a clap and crossed my right hand over towards his right shoulder and Paxton decided to do a little of his own improve and threw in a nose touch 🙂
Robbin
Ozzy is called “the kangeroo” in our house because he jumps straight in the air – up to 4 feet! My son has taught him to do it on command, and he amuses guests when his head pops up into the back door window from the backyard.
Maddie the course designer. in novice nadac, my very green aussie, maddie had to do a spiral jump sequence to the inside, she did it perfectly, but when I tried to get her to exit, she reversed the course and did the entire spiral again backwards outward, by herself, leaving me frantically calling her name and watching as she racked up off course points for a score of 110 fault points! later on in her career we watched the akc championships video, next day the instructor set up the course, getting there late, never walked it, got lost on the 3rd obstacle, she ran to the correct one, barked at me and off we went for a perfect score. she is the best course designer. might not agree w/ the judge but it’s always fun.
My dog can speak on command. It’s nothing spectacular I know, but so many dogs can’t do it! I read the Agility Fusion post on dog’s saying Momma. That’s my next goal for her!