What is the difference between a trick and an obedience behavior when we are training our dogs? The short answer is that there really isn’t one! Most of what we ask our dogs to do isn’t something that wouldn’t naturally occur to them to do, at least not in the context that we want them to perform the skills. Sure, doing things like a spin or a handstand look very different from a sit or down and might be more complicated, but when we boil it back to the basic definition of a trick, technically they all count.
One of the definitions of ‘trick’, and the one that best fits the usage of the word within dog training, is ‘a peculiar or characteristic habit or mannerism’. Another one of the definitions that might be a good fit for our usage is ‘a quick or artful way of getting a result’. With both of these definitions in mind, I truly think that any skill we teach our dogs to perform on cue and for a likely reward qualifies. The true difference between a ‘trick’ and an obedience behavior boils down to the value that we put on the skills that we teach our dogs.
Obedience behaviors are thought by many of us to be of much higher import than tricks. A lot of them are simply an expected price our dogs pay for living in the human world. Walking on a loose leash is a great example of this. When we want our dogs to walk nicely on a loose leash we want them to, typically, walk on concrete at roughly a human pace, walk in a straight line, and keep the random stops for sniffing to a minimum. This is not a natural way for dogs to walk. When our dogs get to choose how they move they are typically much faster than us, even at a trot or walk, they stop to sniff often and really take in and enjoy their smells, and there’s a lot of zigging and zagging. Walking like a human takes a lot of effort and restraint away from their natural drives and behaviors. It’s one of the reasons it’s one of the most frustrating skills to teach our dogs, because it is hard for them!
If we try to shift our mindset away from “this is a behavior my dog should do” and try to frame it more as “look at this cool thing my dog can do” it becomes a lot more enjoyable to teach, and a lot less frustrating when it takes a long time for them to learn it. This is generally how we think about tricks! The more that we shift our thinking to treating every skill we teach our dogs like a trick, we remove some of the pressure from ourselves and our dogs and get to focus more on just having fun and being proud of our pups.
Give it a try and let us know how the mindset treats you!
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