Thankful Thursday - Another Puppy Trick

One of my favorite tricks to teach our dogs is specifically for photography. I like to teach them to rest their chins on the floor either on or between their front paws. It's also fairly easy to teach so I started on it with Hachi.

He knows how to touch things with his nose. He'll touch almost anything that I ask him to touch. So, I started by asking him to touch a rubber disk target with his nose. I placed it on and then under his front paws. When he touched it, he was in the position that I was aiming to teach him to adopt on cue.

After he got good at touching that disk, I removed it. He immediately tried to earn a treat by putting his nose where the disk had just been. Bingo! I clicked and treated him for doing that. He did that repeatedly without me giving any verbal cue yet but with me using an informal hand signal.

In the very last stage, I added the verbal cue which is "head" (I don't know why I chose that word instead of "chin" when I taught my first dog this trick a couple of decades ago - it's funny now!).

Here's a video of the process. You'll see that the big dogs are on a bed behind Hachi. Shyla started creeping forward. Then, I thought that it was hilarious that she began putting her chin on the floor when I said the verbal cue to Hachi. I picked up the camera so that you could see her at one point in the video.

It lets me get fun photos like this one.

And his one...

And because his head is so still, I can focus in on his beautiful eye!

It's so much fun teaching Hachi new things!

Thanks to our friend Brian for hosting the Thankful Thursday Blog Hop.