After having Zeus in our house for about three weeks, I decided it was time to give him a lesson in some basic commands. My goal when I got him was to make this puppy into an outstanding, obedient, overall perfect dog when he grows up and for that to happen, he needed to start at square one. I wanted to teach him how to sit, stay, come, and lay down. I researched online for the proper way to teach a dog commands but every piece of advice I saw offered a different method for accomplishing this task. I decided to just get it done my own way and I'm not sure if I'm a great teacher, or if he's just a really intelligent dog (far more likely), but he seemed to pick up on things very quickly.
In order to teach Zeus how to sit I simply held a treat right above his head and slowly moved my hand forward. This caused his head to slightly tilt back and forced him to go down into a sitting position to get the treat that was right near the back of his head. As this happened I would be saying, "Sit" repeatedly. He had that pretty much down at the end of two 10-minute training sessions which I personally think is very impressive.
To teach him how to stay and come, I started by telling him to sit. Once he sat, I would hold my hand straight out in front of me with the treat inside it and repeat, "Stay" while slowly backing up. At first, he naturally didn't understand what I was asking of him and he would just run after the treat. Every time he did that, I would put the treat behind my back and say, "No" in a firm voice. Then I would start over from the beginning. After about five minutes, he started to understand that I wanted him to stay put. It took about four 10-minute training sessions for him to fully understand "stay". Once he began to get a hold of "stay", "come" came almost instinctively. All I had to do was lower my hand and cup it facing up with the treat inside it, and shout, "Come". To my surprise, there was virtually no training required. From the very first time I tried it, he seemed to know to come to me.
"Down" was definitely the trickiest command to teach him. My strategy was to get him to sit, and then move the treat down towards the floor while repeating, "Down". However, every time I tried this, he seemed to just stand up and put his head down towards the treat. I would then put the treat behind my back and say, "No". Zeus and I went through this dance countless times until once when he got so frustrated that he laid down on the ground. I immediately gave him the treat and praised him. After that incident, I switched my teaching strategy to just simply trying to get him tired so he'd lay on the ground and I could give him the treat. This new strategy worked shockingly well and he understood "down" about ten minutes later.
It's interesting learning about how you trained you dog. I had a dog when I was young, but it never really crossed my mind that the dog could be trained. Even after my sister got her own dog and trained it, it never crossed my mind to make my dog (his name was Pookie) do some sort of trick. I guess I just assumed my dog was too old to learn new tricks, but isn't that a real thing? Old dogs can't learn new tricks? I think I heard it in a movie somewhere.
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