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June 24th
Training and playing with your dog can be an incredibly valuable experience for both you and your dog, and that’s why it’s important to teach them every skill that you can while they are a puppy and still very impressionable. However, even if your dog isn’t a puppy they are just as able to learn skills and teaching your dog to roll over is one of those skills.
Teaching your dog to roll over doesn’t serve any specific function, but it’s a valuable skill to learn for your and your dog so that you know how to teach your dog a process and they know how to respond to basic commands and learn behaviors based on positive reinforcement. Also, all dogs love belly rubs!
We’re going to teach you how to get your dog to roll over so they can develop a healthy bond with you and lay a base for future training activities.
Before you start to teach your dog how to roll over, these are some things that you should make sure you do in order to have the best chance for success.
Skills to Know Beforehand
Before you can teach your dog effectively to roll over, there are a couple of other skills that you should teach them to prepare. They should know how to sit and lie down on command. If you haven’t yet taught your dog these skills, you should do that before you try to roll over.
The reason that they should know these beforehand is because they will need to do these actions before they roll over, as they are natural first steps to lead into the roll over trick.
Other Preparation
In addition to learning how to sit and how to lie down, there are a couple of other things that you need to do in order to be prepared to train your dog how to roll over and other tricks as well. You should have some treats and a clicker device. You also want to make sure that you pick a soft, comfortable spot to teach your dog how to roll over so they won’t have a lot of discomfort while trying to roll around on the ground.
These are the basic steps to teaching your dog how to roll over. If you follow these basic steps and reinforce them with repetition, you should be able to teach your dog how to roll over pretty quickly and easily.
Down Command
As we discussed earlier, the “down” command is crucial to teaching your dog how to roll over. Every roll over starts with getting your dog to lie down. Once you have your dog lying down consistently, you can move on to the next step, which is getting them to actually roll over.
Treat Placement
Where you place the treat that you’re using is one of the most important parts in the whole process. Once your dog is laying down, you should place the treat by its nose.
Once you have the correct positioning, you should pull the treat around towards the shoulder. This forces the dog to lay down on its side if they want the treat. Once you have the dog on its side things get a little bit easier.
Pull the Treat Around
Once you have your dog responding to the treat how you want it to, then you can proceed to bring the treat all the way around so they have to roll over to get it. Dogs may be hesitant to do this sometimes, so you can help them a little bit to show them what to do. You should also make sure that you are doing this on a soft surface so they are comfortable rolling over.
If your dog completes the roll, always be sure to click your clicker and reward them with a treat to show them that they have done the correct behavior. Positive reinforcement is crucially important in this process so they know when they are doing the right thing. They will naturally understand when they are rewarded that they can keep doing that behavior to get the reward and praise from you.
Once you have all of these established, you can transfer everything you’ve taught your dog into the “roll over” command. You should walk through the steps to rolling over while using the roll over command. After a few repetitive uses of the command and getting praise for completing the action, your dog should associate rolling over with the “roll over” command and you can issue that command to get them to roll over.
Once you have all of this down and your dog is consistently doing the roll over trick when commanded to, you can start to take away the treats. This is a crucial part in every step that also tests how good of control you have over your dog and how well they listen and have learned the behaviors that you have taught them.
A dog that can roll over without the incentive of a treat is one that truly understands what is expected of them and it is indicative of a good relationship and trust between you and your dog. Once your dog can roll over using just a command and without the promise of a treat, you can consider them to be fully trained on that command.
If you’re looking for a puppy to teach some new tricks to, be sure to check out this puppy finder! It will help you find a puppy and breed that suits you well.
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