Teaching Your Dog To Lay Down

Here are easy steps to teach your dog to lay down on cue beginning with a food lure. I like to teach sit and lay down separately as dogs can get those two behaviors confused. They will tend to do which ever behavior you most recently have reinforced.  If you have a clicker, you can use clicker training to teach this.

What you will need:

Tasty treats
a clicker if you use one
an environment with minimal distractions – on carpeting is best

How to play:

1. Note: this step may be easiest with you kneeling on the ground in front of your dog. Hold a treat between your thumb and index finger with your palm facing down. Bring it right to your dog’s nose, then slowly move your hand down to the floor and inward to your dog’s body. If your dog’s rear end is still up in the air, hold your hand on the ground (with palm down, covering the treat) until your dog lowers his back end. CLICK or MARK with another sound (like Yes!, Click!, Nice!, or X!). Then give your dog 3 treats in position. (This is fed one at a time, given to your dog in between his front paws.)
2. Then tell your dog to GET IT and either toss a treat a short distance away or hold a treat enough away that he has to get up to get it. When your dog comes back to you, repeat step 1 for five times.
3. Go through the same steps above EXCEPT this time DO NOT have food in that hand moving to the ground. Your hand should still be cupped with palm facing down, the same as it was before. It just does not have food. Repeat 5 times or until your dog is easily putting his rear end down fluidly.
4. Then, to get more repetitions in a quick amount of time, stop feeding in position. Mark your dog for laying down and then give him the treat out of position to start a new cycle of this.
5. Next, go through these steps while you are standing up. Note that your dog should be fluidly moving into the laying down position before moving on.

STOP that session after 2 minutes.  If your dog moved through the first four steps quickly, then add the following steps. Still STOP after 2 minutes. Your dog will retain what you worked on the next time you pick this game back up.

6. If you are beginning step 5 in a new session, begin warming your dog up two times with the food lure. If you are doing this in the same session, while standing, this time don’t bring your hand all the way to the ground. If your dog is getting stuck, go back through the first 4 steps to refresh his memory.
7. Your dog should be fluidly moving into the laying down position before you add a verbal cue.

ADDING A VERBAL CUE

1. To do this, say your verbal cue then count “One One Thousand”, and then move your arm down (your old cue). After your dog lays down, mark your dog, give him several treats in position (one at a time, in between his paws) and then feed him out of position. Repeat this 10 times.
2. If you have worked through these steps until your dog is fluent at laying down, at some point, your dog will lay down after hearing your verbal cue. Mark and treat that. Then feed him out of position. Do this 5 times.
3. NOTE: I suggest using a different word from DOWN as your verbal cue as DOWN is often used in a negative connotation. Some other ideas – drop, relax, settle. (Not to complicate things this early but there are different kinds of laying down – a relaxed laying down with your dog rolled onto a hip or a ready-for-action laying down. Later you can teach these as separate behaviors. However, for now, think about what you would like for this lay down to look like and mark/reinforce for that.)

STOP after 2 minutes.

1. Next session: Warm your dog going through Step 1 of adding your verbal cue above for 3 repetitions.
2. Then say your verbal cue without the hand gesture to test your dog’s knowledge of the behavior. When your dog is fluidly going into the laying down position, do 5 repetitions.
3. Then you can begin to add some duration. Instead of marking right away for your dog laying down, count one one thousand, then give your mark and feed out of position. Then count two one thousand, give your mark and feed out of position. Do this up to 5 seconds. If your dog gets up too soon, go back to the beginning of this session from Step 1.
4. You can also release your dog to do something else like hand target. Before doing that, you will need to teach the hand target behavior separately with high value reinforcers.