The New Tricks Club

The Boyz may have poker, but us girls, we know about tricks.
One of my friends came up with an idea. Let's have a Trick night. So we convened our first trick night. At first we didn't know what to do so I made some soup and we sat around sipping our soup and making a plan.

We decided to pick a trick and all of us work on it. The trick we choose was put your paw over your muzzle. We came up with the idea of putting tape on the dogs nose and click for the paw swiping the muzzle. I had my doubts that this would work, but OMG did it work.

For each dog tape location played a role in success. Some dogs needed it on their ear, some on their muzzle, some on the forehead. Here is Fin modeling the latest in trick making tape.

What we did was click for the foot movement and as we fed grabbed the tape off the dog so we could capture the behavior without the tape. Each of us had two sessions with each of our dogs. All of us got the beginnings of the behavior. What surprised me the most is how little impact the tape actually had. I was convinced that Fin would hate the tape. She was extremely tollerent and had no problem of me putting tape on or taking it off.

Then we decided to change it up and give the dogs something to interact with. The idea was to have the dogs step in a bowl. Some of us had worked on this before so we had a variety of levels working. All of us progressed.


Paw over muzzle trick.

More Paws over muzzle.

Putting four paws in a bowl.

All in all a fun winter activity.