3 Simple Tricks To Teach Your Dog “Find It” Game”

Hi. I am Jess Rollins. I am the founder of Pet Expertise and a professional reward based dog trainer for over ten years.

And today I want to talk about a couple of behaviors that I teach a lot of my clients because they're very useful and simple and fun.

The find a game and the hunt game.

So the the Find it game is going to add more fun to your reward. So you can reward your dog by handing a piece of food.

You can reward your dog by saying Find it, and it also gets your dog focused down, which is useful sometimes. But so we're combining play and food so we have an even more potent reward.

Hunt is going to teach your dog to look for food on the ground, which can keep them busy.

Samalia. Come here. Good girl. Yay. So we're up in Samalia today. She's pretty new to training, but a fairly calm dog. So a good demo for us.

So what I'm going to do first is to Find It so when the dog is looking at me, it's fine. If she's not looking at me, I could say her name when she looks actually, I'm just going to start with Find it.

So I throw it where she can see it for beginning find It.So I'm clicking or using my reward marker words when she looks at me.

And that's because I want to reward attention to me as part of this game. Why not find it over here? Right here. All right. So that's the find a game. Super easy, right?

The Hunt game is when she's not looking. I put a few treats on the ground, and thenwhen she's done eating, I say Samalia Hunt, and I help her find the food at first, and I watch.

And when she is done eating all of the food, I'm going to say a release word so she knows it's all gone. If I want to really extend this game, I can keep adding food to the ground while she's doing that so that I can have a longer session of Hunt three. So that's her cue. That it's. All done.

Find it. And I can start over with find it. She missed that one. Find it. Come here. She's a little slow. So again, the whole sequence.You can play each game by themselves, but to play them together, you wait for your dog to be not so distracted they can't look at you.

You could say their name, and then when they look at you, click Find It and pause when they're looking away doing their Find It is when you place somehidden treats when they're done eating their Find It treat. You say Hunt, you help them find it. Then you say free when they're all done. And you can keep repeating it so you can see.

I hope you can see how these behaviors are useful. The Hunt I find useful for reactivity so dogs that are scared of things, I might want them focused on the ground sometimes as part of a management plan. Right. So if I know a dog is walking by and she might have a reaction, I have her hunt.

Okay.That's not necessarily going to solve our problems. We need to do other things. But that can keep her out of trouble with Find it. For instance, I can use it when people come over and the dog might be a little too excited. I might need to use leashes and gates to prevent jumping. But one tool I have is to do Find it far away from the guest. So the dog anticipates.

After a while when a guest comes, I got to look for treats and that brings that jumpy energy down. Can also use the Find a game for things your dog might want to bark at. Like deliveries coming. So they start to bark. You can do Find It, toss away from whatever's causing them to bark. So they start to pair thing to bark at.

Get ready to do Find It game that brings that barking energy down. That really just works with alert barking. That would not work if yourdog's looking at you for food.You would not want to do Find it then and barking because then that would definitely reinforce the barking. But because the barking is emotional and unconscious, you can use Find it for it and it will bring that energy down.

So in summary, right, find It and hunt great simple games. Not only do they teach your dog good things like pay attention to me how to or ridge, but it's a good way to interact with your dog positively. To get a little exercise, get a little brain exercise, enrichment. And it can be useful for managing different kinds of naughty behavior. I bet you can come up with even more.And so thank you for watching again.

I'm Jess Rollins and I enjoy talking toyou and I hope to see you again.