Teaching a stellar "Down" with a verbal or visual cue

Every dog already knows how to lie down -- your dog lies down all the time! The trick to training a "down" is to teach your dog to do it when you ask for it. That involves adding a cue. In this episode, Annie addresses the difference between a "cue" and a "command," and talks about some of the pitfalls people tend to fall into when attempting to cue a dog -- is the dog responding to your words? Or your body language? Or both? Or neither?! Annie goes over how to teach a "down" using two methods: Capturing, and luring. For the former, she describes how to use a verbal cue. For the latter, she explains how to morph a lured down into a down that is a response to a clear and subtle visual cue. The result is a dog who will understand what you want in as little as just one training session.

Also make sure to see our recent episode on training "Sit."

“How to train a dog to "sit" from scratch”

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Partial Transcript

Annie

Hello humans, thank you for tuning in to School for the Dogs podcast. As some of you know, I had a baby

almost a month ago. I've been trying to find the perfect time to record this podcast all day and waiting

for her to take a nap or at least be quiet for a while and finally decided I needed to do it while feeding

her bottle so if you hear adorable little sucking and gurgling noises, that is my daughter who is a foot

away from the microphone guzzling down some milk. So sorry sorry that the extra noise, maybe we can

just pretend that baby Magnolia here is my co host. Listen to these adorable sounds, you can't make this

kinda stuff up… and that was my dog snorting.

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Today I wanted to go over how to teach your dog to lie down and as I mentioned in the episode I did a

few months ago on teaching the dog to sit - obviously lying down is something your dog already knows

how to do good, your dog lies down all the time-the trick is of course to teach your dog to lie down

when you ask him or her to do it. So it's really just about adding a cue to a behavior your dog already

knows and, like many dog trainers, use the word cue instead of the word command although if you want

to say command instead of cue that's okay with me.

Full transcript available at the podcast