Lots of Dogdancers use Clickertraining to train their dogs. It became a very important tool for them to teach their dogs new tricks. Clickertraining makes it easier for the dog to understand a new behavior and it can help to make a dog ready for competition. In addition it emphasizes the creativity of a dog. That way a dog is able to develop the trick on his own and to adapt it tohis physical abilities.
I don’t want to mention every possible or impossible trick, but I would like to tell you more about the basics of many tricks, the target.
Targets
A target is something the dog is supposed to touch with certain parts of his body.
The Handtarget is always the first thing I teach a dog, after he understood the meaning of the clicker. This is an easy exercise for beginners. The dog is supposed to touch your hand with his nose and stay there or keep touching it. He should also follow your hand. Using a handtarget, you can teach your dog perfect heelwork. In addition the Handtarget is needed to teach your dog tricks like roll over, sit pretty, dead dog or weaving through your legs.
For the Pawtarget the dog should touch your hand with his paw, like he would do for the high five behavior. To teach your dog the pawtarget, you can put a cookie in your fist and present it to your dog. Wait till the dog puts his paw on your fist, the open your fist and let the dog have the cookie. If your dog repeatedly puts his paw on your fist, stop putting a cookie into it, but keep clicking and treating the right behavior. Then you can slowly open your fist till you get the shake trick. Now you can move your hand more and more towards the end position, which is he high five trick. The pawtarget in itself is already pretty cute, but it is the foundation for marching, crossing paws, and crawling.
The Targetstick is a stick your dog is supposed to touch with his nose at the top. The easiest way to teach this is to shape it. Wait and click when your dog looks at the Targetstick. After a few repetitions, wait till the dog sniffs the stick and click then. Now if your dog shows that behavior again and again, only click him for touching the stick at the top. The Targetstick is a great tool to teach small dogs how to do a nice heelwork and how to weave through your legs. He works as a longer handtarget. For big and small dogs, the Targetstick is a help to learn tricks like twist (turning in a circle), round (going a circle around human), and stretching.
The Groundtarget can be some kind of plastic lid or something similar that your dog is supposed to touch with his paws or nose. Like we did with the targetstick, you can shape the behavior you want (i.e. nose touch or paw touch). Put the target on the floor and click your dog for looking at it, moving towards it, touching it. Once your dog repeatedly touches the target, he understood the behavior. A Groundtarget can be a great help to teach your dog to do different jumps. Apart from that it can help you teaching your dog to do tricks at a distant, because your dog has a fix spot you can sent him to.