A well-trained dog is a dog that is pleasing to be around.  By giving your pooch in need proper training, you greatly increase the dog’s chance of adoption. However, not all dogs learn by the same training technique, so it requires that you become creative in your ways of getting your dog to do what you want.

Here we take an odd behavior that dogs would otherwise not be inclined to do, and train them to do it on command. Our goal is to train the dog to stand with two feet on an upside down bucket.

Ida is very food motivated, and not very particular as to where her feet are. She was easy to lure towards the bucket and, with a click and treat, she quickly learned that we wanted her to do something with it.

In her hurry to get the food reward however, she would tip over the bucket, making it hard to mark the behavior we wanted.

By providing some stability with my foot, I could lure her onto the bucket and click the exact moment we were looking for - both feet on the bottom. After many repetitions, I started giving the command “up” to cue her to stand on the bucket.

By incorporating a “wait” command, we could get her to stay on the bucket just as we had wanted.

That’s the technique we used with training Ida but, when it came to train this to Jaeger, we found that this technique did not work as well with him. Though Jaeger likes his fair share of treats, he is much more picky as to where his feet are and didn’t jump up on the bucket by luring.

So we tried a new technique, by asking him to “shake” on command and treating him for every time he touched the bucket. Remember to reward your dog for every small step it takes in completing the task, as a well-rewarded dog is more likely to stay interested throughout the training session.

Soon we only were rewarding him for full paw touches to the bucket. Once he grasped the idea that we actually wanted him to do something with the bucket, it was easy to lure him on up. Then all we had to do was incorporate the command “up” along with a “wait”.

We encourage you to use creativity when training: the more ways you can think of accomplishing a task, the easier it will be when training a multitude of shelter dogs.