Monday's Trick Challenge: Target

Target Training

Targeting is when a dog touches an object with his or her nose. Teaching a dog to target is helpful when introducing other tricks such as closing doors, turning on or off light switches, or hitting contact zones on Agility equipment. Below is a video where I explain how to begin target training.

The next step in target training, once your dog is touching your hand with no food in it, is to apply a Post-It note to your hand. Practice several times with the dog touching the Post-It on your hand (you may want to invest in a whole pack, as they tend to get slobbery and loose their stickiness!).

Once reliably touching the Post-It you can remove it from your hand and use the Post-It to introduce your dog to other tricks such as closing the door, by sticking the Post-It to the door. It will take a lot of encouragement to move from your hand to the door, but if the dog has associated the Post-It with the behaviour for long enough he should catch on. Eventually, you will be able to remove the Post-It and the dog can touch the object you wish with a chosen command and nothing else!