This is perhaps the easiest (and simplest) dog training method known to man...

Did you know that you can turn ANY behavior your dog does naturally and turn it into a trick?

Behaviors like:

Bottom line - if your dog does something, you can capture it and turn it into a trick.

Let me give you an example.

A friend of mine owned this very large dog, approximately 200 pounds, and whenever she had guests over at her home, they always felt intimidated by her large dog.

Even though her dog was the sweetest... People didn't trust her, and they were anxious and uncomfortable.

Until one day, when she simply captured her dog sleeping upside down (belly side up.)

She turned it into a trick and now, whenever someone visited her home, the first thing she would do is get her dog to flop over.

It made people feel at ease, and disarmed their fear.

So, how do you capture behaviors?

Simple!

All you have to do is reward your dog whenever you see your dog doing the behavior.

The key, however, is you NEED to have precise timing.

You can't reward your dog 5 minutes after he does something you want. It has to be immediate. The quicker you are able to give your reward, the better.

A trick is to use a marker signal, such as a clicker or using the word "YES!" to let your dog know which behavior earned him the treat.

You would want to give that marker signal at the exact moment your dog performs the behavior, followed by a treat.

Here's the exact sequence of events:

For your dog to effectively understand what you want... Each step MUST occur immediately after each other, within one second... But also, NOT at the same time.

Let me give you an example, where a dog owner taught her dog to yawn:

To mark the behavior (and communicate with her dog which behavior earned him the treat), she used a clicker while her dog was yawning, followed by giving him a treat.

Notice that she ignored ALL other behaviors and patiently waited for her dog to yawn.

She didn't say "Yawn!" or instructed her dog to do anything. She simply waited.

This is what you have to do.

Now, if you are want to capture a behavior that doesn't occur frequently, such as sneezing. It would be best to keep a stash of cookies in a cookie jar and mark the behavior with the word "YES!".

This way, when your dog does the behavior, you can say "YES!" and immediately give him a treat.

When my dog Chase was just a puppy, I used this training method to train her to pee on command.

Here's how I did it:

First, I rewarded (or captured) her behavior of peeing outside on the grass. As soon as she was done squatting I immediately said "YES!" and gave her a treat.

Second, I started saying the verbal command "DUTIES" in a soft tone of voice while she was squatting and peeing on the grass, followed with a reward (same step as above) once she was done.

After a few weeks of doing this every day, she started to associate the word "DUTIES" with peeing, and I was able to test her conditioning by saying it and seeing if she would actually go pee.

She did!

There really is no limit as to what behavior you can capture. You can even manufacture behaviors if you want, for example, I taught my dog Onyx to touch her nose with her front paw and turned it into "Are you shy?"

It was the cutest! Literally, everyone loved that trick.

Here's what it looks like: