This is Chester. He is our Chihuahua, in the picture above he is giving a ‘wave’. He knows many tricks and commands and in this blog I will try to explain to you how I taught him all these myself.
Introducing Chester
The first step.
The first real steps we took with Chester was to introduce him to a reward scheme, we used Royal Canin Educ treats, these have a very low calorie count per treat and are easy to break up into pieces so you can make it last longer.
We used to just play about with him on the floor and just randomly feed him the treats until he really got used to them and knew from probably the rustle of the packet that we had some treats in our hands.
To get him to execute the ‘SIT’ command we simply held the treat in front of his face when he was standing, making sure he knew what we had in our hand, then slowly we moved our hand (the one with the treat in) towards his tail, slowly raising it so he is looking up at the treat hand until he started to walk backwards, all this would be going on whilst we were saying the ‘SIT’ word every few seconds, eventually he would sit down as a natural reaction, we then gave him the treat and repeated the word ‘SIT’ whilst rewarding him, giving him plenty of physical fussing to so he associated all of this with a very great and rewarding experience.
You have to do this quite a few times in a 15-20 minute period and then stop and wait until tomorrow to do it all again, the dog will lose interest otherwise and it will inhibit their learning. We also found that just giving him a fuss as a reward sometimes instead of the treat worked too.
To take this command to the next level, only once he really mastered the SIT I introduced a hand signal while saying “sit”, the gesture I use is just holding my index finger out. You need to repeat this learning process just like you did with the original SIT command and the dog will associate this too with SIT, but do not forget the reward!!!!
Now Chester will sit just by me holding my index finger out which is really quite impressive.
MY NEXT POST WILL BE THE DOWN/LIE COMMAND
I HOPE THAT THIS HAS GIVEN YOU SOME ADVICE ON HOW TO TRAIN YOUR CHIHUAHUA, IF YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO KEEP POSTING THESE INSTRUCTIONALS THEN PLEASE LET ME KNOW AND ALSO IF THIS HAS HELPED YOU TRAIN YOUR CHIHUAHUA THEN PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT
howtotrainyourchihuahua 