How To Teach Your Dog To Pick Up Objects

A more advanced dog obedience training task is to teach your dog how to pick up a desired object. In this article, we will show you a step-by-step way of training your dog to do this.

Here’s how to make him pick up an object:

Tease your dog by bringing the object up close to his nose.

Now move the object down towards the floor. Your dog will be interested and follow the object. Say “Good dog”.

Rest the object on the floor, but don’t take your hand away. Command your dog to “Hold” as he moves forwards to take the object in his mouth.

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Take your hand away from the object – your dog should pick it up. At the same time, you should repeat the command “Hold”.

This exercise can often have many problems attached with it so here’s some tips to overcome the most common things that go wrong:

If your dog tries to spit out the object (very common problem at first), say “Bah!” and hold it in place. Make sure you’re not forcing him to do anything he doesn’t want to.

Don’t say “hold” yet either.

Here’s why: Your dog will associate the word “Hold” with an experience of something he doesn’t like just yet. This is make this exercise harder and harder to train.

If your dog turns his head away from the object, just follow his head around with the object. But if he’s uncomfortable, don’t force him to do anything he doesn’t want to.