Hello everyone! Welcome to February's Trick of the Month!
I decided to go with crawl this month. It's simple but hey it's a short month and last month's trick was hard (for me haha). Full disclosure, Wendy loves to army crawl when she wants to say hi to a stranger but I've never tried to transfer that to an on-demand trick. Will I be able to? Will I just be reinforcing this behaviour that I actually find kind of annoying on walks? Let's find out!
Here's how it works:
1: Teach a dog the trick. Don't own a dog? Borrow your neighbors or grandmas dog, they'll be thrilled when you teach them cool things.
2: Film the dog performing the trick.
3: Upload video/picture
4: Post link to video or pictures in the results thread that will appear at the end of the month.
@colwyn Can I request that we go back to not having a results thread? We could just have this one thread for the whole month, so everyone can post discussion and results all in one place throughout the month. It was done that way for a while and I really liked it, but seems we've reverted to two threads per month (not sure why?).
@inhissight I'm new to managing this so didn't know it was ever one post (I might have reverted back to the two posts when I took it over whoops!)! I'm open to more thoughts on this and would be happy to change the format if that's what people would prefer.
I'm thinking we have two posts because there's not always room to sticky it at the top (I think there's a limit to the number of posts that can be stickied).
@colwyn I second the single post. We're attempting to consolidate the two stickies right now to make room for this, so having the results in one thread - maybe under a big comment like "POST YOUR RESULTS" so that everyone can see. Maybe even a few days in advance to the end of the month?
@colwyn You're doing all the work of managing it so I'll go with whatever you decide
On our end, we'll prioritize keeping it stickied. Like BoundingBorder said, we're consolidating all the other welcome info and rules into a single post, so there will be one slot consistently available for trick of the month.
@colwyn Love this! Tried to teach my puppy this when he was 3 months old.. Didn't work so good. Last night restarted trying to do it and he started getting the hang of it. Had his big boy operation today so we will try to be calm for a few days but I want to get this down before March!
@colwyn I'm really struggling with this one. I started off with having my dog lay down. He'll stay down to pick up treats as long as it is within reach, but as soon the treat is beyond reach, he will stand to pick it up.
If I keep the treat in my hand and near the ground, he'll get frustrated about not getting it and walk away. He's a smart dog haha.
Edit: We had a break through yesterday! My dog is really good at not going after a treat unless told he could, so he was having trouble going from the lay down position to crawling to get the treat. I was resorting to telling him to get the treat, which he then broke his "lay down" to get the treat. I stopped using words and just kept motioning with my hand that I wanted him to follow until he eventually got it.
@colwyn Crawl was one of the first tricks my boyfriend taught our pup, Laika, when we first got her. We didn't work too hard at it, so she never fully learned it though. Maybe relearning it will be easy? Either way should be fun.
Laika jumps on people to greet them so if she could learn to replace jumping with crawling that would be amazing and super cute but I'm not going to get my hopes up.
