The task: How to teach your dog to lie down.

Why you want to teach your dog to lie down, I don’t know. I personally don’t teach mine that. I teach them to sit – and sit means sit, stay, don’t move, just sit. I don’t teach ‘stay’ I just teach sit. To move, the dog would have needed to break the ‘sit’ and so if they did that, I wouldn’t have taught the ‘sit’ right, would I?

Tip: when teaching a dog to lie down I recommend positive, reward based methods. Forcing a dog to lie down is doomed to failure, as with all dog learning exercises you are seeking to teach, not force.

But some folks like to have dogs who will lie down when they tell em’ too. And my goal today is to show how you can do that, but I want to do it in the fewest words possible and without advising anyone to ‘alpha roll’ their pet or achieve the result using a big old stick. This is all about the carrot. Or in this case, cheese.

Lesson Plan: How To Teach a Dog To Lie Down

So the lesson starts now – you can start counting the words from here…

Get some cheese.

Dogs like cheese.

I hope yours does.

If it doesn’t, get some other food. Ideally one that is not hard/crunchy and can be broken in small pieces.

Put dog on lead.

With dog in one hand, cheese in other, bend down on one knee creating an ‘archway’ with your other leg.

‘Waggle’ cheese on other side of archway so the dog has to ‘crawl’ through the arch to get to the cheese.

Make sure dog can’t go round archway.

As soon as dog starts to crawl through archway they are in the ‘lie down’ position.

As the dog gets in to the ‘lie down’ position, say the command you want to use “Lie down”

When the dog’s belly touches the floor as they crawl through the arch, give cheese.

Repeat. Say ‘Lie down’ and waggle cheese on the other side of the arch encouraging the dog to associate ‘Lie down’ with being in a lying position and getting cheesed, which, if you are dog, is pleasant.

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