Radical Canines

Hold is one of those tricks that I love because it makes for super cute pictures! All three boys now know hold, but for a while I didn’t think I would ever be able to say that. I have used different methods to teach hold and quite honestly the method I used for Ryder and Rugby was pretty much the same but it did not work for Rumor. Not even a little. So after about 5 years of trying to teach hold on and off (I’d get frustrated and move on to other things), I thought a hold for Rumor was just out of the question. Enter Abby Cline. I took an online tricks class with her (thanks COVID for clearing my schedule and making that possible) that was AMAZING! Highly recommend and would definitely do it again.

Rumor’s Method

One thing I like about Abby is she gives credit where credit is due. She learned this method from Apryl of PVbybe and it worked great for Rumor. This is actually how I have started teaching holds this way in my tricks class instead of my previous methods for Ryder and Rugby below. Rumor is a dog that needs A LOT of repetition and high rate of reward to learn new things. So this method started with a collar grab, followed by a face hold, an object place in the mouth with hand support to keep the mouth closed on the object, and then slow fading of the hands (on the face and the collar). The “give” (release of the object) is what gets rewarded so if he spits it out or doesn’t hold it there’s no reward. Brilliant. 5 years of multiple failures and we got this down in 3 weeks. Granted it still needs proofing and we’re still working on transferring the hold to other objects but we have a hold!

Ryder’s Method

Ryder was the first dog I ever taught a hold to, and I’ll be honest it was part of our prep for a larger competition. The competition was a hot dog retrieve. Yep, you read that right. A cold, thawed, slimy, raw hotdog is thrown 10 ft away, the dog is sent out to retrieve it, and the dog that retrieves the largest piece wins. Ryder got about 1/2 way back with the whole thing and then decided he’d rather eat it. Anyway. In preparation for this I thought, he’ll have to hold a hot dog without eating it before he can retrieve one. So I took a hotdog, wrapped it in Saran Wrap and froze the whole thing. This only worked because Ryder is such a good dog and I wasn’t worried he’d rip it out of my hands and swallow the whole frozen thing Saran Wrap and all. I’d have him bite the hot dog while I held onto it, cue the release, and reward with….hot dogs. Once he was starting to understand that teeth maintained on the hot dog meant hot dogs were coming that he could eat I started to slowly fade my hand away. We worked on adding other textures and objects after that. Now he will hold almost anything I ask him to but food items are still really tough. It’s also really hard to get a hold with his ears, so we’re working on combining his ears cue with his hold and it’s been tough but we’re making progress.

Rugby’s Method

I used a method pretty similar to Ryder with Rugby but instead of a frozen hot dog (because I did NOT trust him to not try to rip it out of my hands and swallow the whole thing), I used toys to teach his hold. Everything else was pretty much the same. Rugby’s holds are my favorite because he doesn’t tend to loose his ears when I ask him to hold. We’re working on our hold with position changes so that he can roll himself into a burrito!

So they finally all know hold! We haven’t quite mastered all 3 holding things in the same picture yet or a shared hold with two dogs holding one thing but eventually maybe that will happen. For now, I’m just happy they’ll hold things for pictures!