You are listening to your new puppies podcast. Starting you and your dog off on the right paw. Here's your

host Debbie Salento. Hello and welcome to episode 62 of your new puppies podcast. I'm Debbie and today I'm going to walk you through my mini journey of teaching Mariah the trick spin.

Now my goal here isn't for you to be able to go and teach your

dog spin. My goal is to walk you through the process, meaning the ups and downs, the adjustments I had to make,

the wins we had, the lessons that I learned, my own mistakes,

setbacks we had in the middle of training, because we so often forget

that training a new behavior doesn't happen in a straight line despite what you know YouTube videos or books or even

our obedience class says because how many times have you looked up something on YouTube

and it was obviously a dog who already knew the trick but it's really the only way to demonstrate how to do a trick in you know three to five minutes and

unfortunately this leads us to think that we're inept and we don't

know what we're doing, like we're doing something wrong, our dogs doing something wrong,

are we a hot mess or the treats wrong where?

No, it's probably just part of the process, even for me.

So I will add the formal steps of teaching spin in the show notes because I know some of you are going to really want that.

But what I want to do inside this episode is go over the part of training

this type of skill that those steps don't tell you.

And also illustrate why this type of training,

obedience, skills, and trick training is such a valuable part of your dog's overall training.

Because besides learning the actual command, you and your dog are also learning from each other throughout the whole process.

So it took Mariah a little over a week to learn the trick and when I say that I want her to do it without the food lore,

with just the visual cue, which is the hand signal,

and just with the vocal command.

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