The Games They Play
Sunday, April 15, 2012 at 5:37PM 
Did you know you can teach a dog to play hide and go seek? You really can.
Mothers or pups will hide under furniture and pounce out saying tag you are it.
Havanese are really intelligent and they enjoy you working their brain. By training them you actually create a greater bond and you get a dog that you can show off and enjoy as they are well mannered and ... well smart. But you have to teach them.
But when you start training them and you can start now you do it for a max of 10 minutes at a time no more. They are pups and easily distracted.
Take a treat, put it to their nose and bring it back over their head. They will naturally go into a sit and say sit and then reward. Eventually they will sit with just the command.
They are what you put into them - honest. You can go as far as teaching them to get the yellow toy or the red toy etc.
Each time you go somewhere give them a word association. For instance each time you go into the car say 'car' and each time you return home just before you arrive tell them 'home' and soon you wil be communicating with them.
We used to use walk for walks when we didn't want them to know what we were talking about as we were just asking if the other wanted to go on one and the dogs got excited. Then we switched to ambulate and they soon understood that and we switched yet again - well they are smarter than you think.
Reader Comments (1)
Hide and Seek is one of Ripley's favorite games. We live in a loft and I throw a toy over the railing to the lower level and while he runs downstairs to fetch, I hide. He usually finds me pretty quickly as I can often see him looking and it makes me laugh. But fair is fair and he gets a treat for finding me. We are working on learning to "crawl" now. Teaching him new things seems to make him so happy (okay, it's probably all the praise and the treats too) but seeing him so pleased with himself makes me happy too. Win, win!