Clubs Offering:
A lot of lifestyle obedience commands can be considered tricks
Then I realized that a lot of our day-to-day obedience commands could count as both novice and intermediate tricks.
Things like going to her bed and staying until she is released (our place command), going between our legs in “middle” position (something we use for safety around other dogs), and even catching a ball in the air (a huge part of our play) could all go towards our trick titles!
What’s more — trick training is just plain fun. After Scout had a seizure in the middle of December, I really prioritized having a good time together. We were able to teach “meerkat” (our term for sit pretty) in just over a week, and I got hooked.
Practiced and filmed our tricks
Right off the bat, Scout knew enough tricks for her novice title. I decided to go for both novice and intermediate at once, so we spent a bit of time cleaning up our hand signals and learning to balance a treat on her head before filming our entries!
We then filmed each trick in an individual clip. You can also film your entry all in one take — I personally decided to go one at a time because I’m a bit of an organization freak, and this allowed me to name each video file accordingly. AKC evaluators will accept them either way.
We used our marker words and food rewards during our trick filming, which is allowed at both the novice and intermediate level.