Are you struggling to teach your Schapendoes to sit? The talent of sitting up is quite easily taught to little dogs, yet much bigger canines are another story. It’s hard for them to keep their balance.
Teach Your Schapendoes to Sit: Preparing
Sitting up is one of the initial techniques that you should teach to a Schapendoes and provides the ground work for many other techniques. To train a Schapendoes to sit up, organize some treats as a perk, and put the Schapendoes on her rump in a corner, to ensure she will not fall either aft or sideways and has very little or no space to lose balance.
Teach Your Schapendoes to Sit: Familiarize Her With The Sound of The Words
Protect her from pitching forward by holding 1 hand beneath her chin and using your other hand hold her snack above your Schapendoes’s face. Keep saying intelligibly and clearly, “sit.” Do not make her sit for too long at any one time, however repeat the instruction routinely and reward her often with lots of appreciation and treats.
Teach Your Schapendoes to Sit: Help Her Balance
During the very first lesson she will need quite a bit of help from you to keep her from falling forward, but as she gains more control of the stabilizing muscles and understands what you want, she will count less and less on your hand to keep her in position. Then you can gradually give her less help until you will only have to maintain one hand in position 2 or 3 inches from her chin or neck, to be in position to prevent her falling forward; in the future you will be able to remove this hand completely and merely dangle the treat just above the level of your Schapendoes’s face.
Teach Your Schapendoes To Sit: Remove the Help Gradually Over Time
With regular training your Schapendoes will stay seated well after you get her to sit. Then she should be set against your wall, so as to provide her a support for her back only. After she has gotten the knack of this and can keep her posture effortlessly, practice with her against chair legs, pillows or other items that offer her less and less help and support. In the end she will understand how to keep her balance and sit up in the absence of something to lean against.
Teach Your Schapendoes to Sit: Putting It All Together
In the course of all this training the phrase "sit up" will have been impressed upon her mind through frequent repetition. Last is the final training to teach your Schapendoes to sit up as soon as she hears the phrase. There's a great chance, if she has been diligently instructed, you will only have to call her out into the room, show a reward, hold it up a reasonable distance from the ground, say "sit up" and she will do so. Then just give her the snack while still in place.
The only criteria for excellence is to train with her multiple times daily until she will sit up when told and without being shown a reward; give her the rewards only after she has obeyed the direction.
Teach Your Schapendoes Other Tricks
You have now the technique for teaching your Schapendoes many other skills. She can now learn to beg by waving your hand up and down just in front of her paws, which she'll move in conjunction with yours. She can also learn to salute by moving one paw up to the side of her head, or to hold an object in her mouth, or to wear a hat on her head or wear other clothes.
When teaching a Schapendoes to tolerate being dressed up, don't try to make her wear too many garments simultaneously. Try at first with just a hat. Only after she becomes adjusted to that you can put on a jacket and little by little introduce her to more clothing.
Take pleasure in "teaching your Schapendoes the sit up trick" and most importantly have fun along the way!
Don't forget to check out these other articles about Schapendoess
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