After watching the Life's Ruff Dog Performance, I was inspired to teach Mr. B. some new tricks. If you teach a dog a basic "paw" command, you can eventually teach them to "high five" and even "wave"--Miss M's favorite trick.
You can condition your dog by first touching your hand to their paw, then giving positive reinforcement of "yes" or a treat. After doing this several times, you can move on to grabbing the paw in the air while still giving positive reinforcement. Eventually, after being consistent and keeping things positive, the dogs should learn the command. Mr. B caught on quickly, and we were proud to add "shake" to his only other commands of "sit", "down", and "stay". Here he is showing off his new skills:
The unfortunate thing is, Mr. B didn't recognize this as a new trick. Somehow he thought it was replacing one of the two tricks he knew, and instead of doing his "down" command, he could just replace it with "shake". He kind of turned "Frankendog" on one of his walks when E wanted him to lie down and he just kept hitting E in the shins. So now we realize he only has a 3-trick limit.
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