
Murphy and Teller are always my guinea pigs as I come up with new content for the challenges. Essentially they are my furry gauges on the difficulty of the tricks that I'm asking our students to teach their dogs. Both boys are incredibly clicker savvy (operant) dogs so I aim to shape the behavior in two relatively short (one stick) sessions. I try to choose tricks and behaviors that will ultimately be useful for dogs and handlers should they choose to go on with - or continue their training.
When I've zero'ed in on the challenge of the month, Teller often becomes my model dog for the learning portion of the website because (among other things) he loves to pose for the camera, he's pretty cute while he's doing it and he will hold a pose as long as I ask him so that I can get a good shot. It's also important (to me) to use original content whenever possible - partially because it's cheaper than buying stock content - but it's guaranteed to be original. How many times have we navigated corporate content only to find the same stock image used over and over again?
I've called this month's trick "Trout". For no other reason than April's trick was called "Perch". The Perch trick required that dogs put their two front feet on an object (paint can, pot, stool, etc) and when trying to think of a name for the same trick with the dog's two rear feet all I could think of was "Trout" - though I'm pretty sure NOW that the opposite of a Perch is actually a Sturgeon.

Demonstrations of Trout and Perch:

It's so much fun to see our students embrace the challenge of teaching new behaviors. We ask that folks shape these tricks (or at least try to shape them) and it's super to see their dogs start to really think about offering behaviors! So go out and Trout!
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