Teaching your puppy to heel on stairs can be tricky. The puppies natural tendency when he sees uneven objects like a set of stairs is to just run as fast as he can up or down them, you know how that goes! Teaching a puppy to pay attention on stairs is also very good safety.
He needs to learn how to walk on them one step at a time. Another thing you could do is while you’re walking down the stairs you could walk backwards and keep him blocked so he couldn’t just zip on by you.
I’m using food in my hand to keep his attention but when he walks down the stairs the dog would have his head down because the stairs have a decline to them so it is important to get him to stop when you stop. The dog paying attention plays an integral part in everything that we teach with our professional dog trainers at Sit Means Sit dog training company.
Stairs can also be a great change of pace exercise as the dog gets more proficient at it and you can practice with your dog moving quickly or moving slowly on them. In the last part of our daily dog training video you see me turning the dog to both his left and to his right side.
This puppy can already perform this well on flat solid land, so I’m just teaching him that the rules are not any different just because the texture of the land is different. He still must remember that Sit Means Sit.
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