Toby my Golden (I mean Chestnut) Retriever

Who needs a dog when you have a Toby? Toby is my 43” pony. I bought him at an Amish auction when he was three. The Amish trained him for driving. I still use him to pull a cart, and my 7-year-old granddaughter rides him - or tries to! He’s a little stubborn under saddle.

For this trick, I used the clicker training method. You can hear the click in the video when I take the cone from him. You click, then give a treat after the click.

Consistency is very important. You must click at the exact moment when they are doing what you want. They will come to associate their behavior with the click/treat, and they’ll begin to try things (knowing they’re working for a treat) to see whether it’s what you want.

Precise timing of the click will make the training go faster. I’d say this trick took about three weeks to teach. I only worked with him once or twice a day. It would have gone faster if I’d spent more time on it each day.

You train this way with gradual steps.

• At first, I dropped the cone close to him. His natural curiosity made him reach down and sniff the cone. I clicked him at first for that. He had no previous experience with clicker training, so the early training was helping connect in his mind that a click would be followed by a treat.

• When he was consistently touching the cone, I raised my standard. Next, I wanted him to “mouth” the cone. Toby loves to put things in his mouth, anyway, so this didn’t take too long. I did not click when he simply touched it. This confused him a little at first, but clicker training is great for producing “try” behavior in horses. He knew there was something he had to do to get that click, he just had to figure out what it was.

• So we progressed from there - touch the cone, mouth the cone,

  • pick up the cone

  • take at least one step toward me with the cone (you can use a lead rope here to encourage that at first)

  • walk all the way to me and allow me to take the cone.

The last step was one of Toby’s hardest. He really didn’t want to give up his cone! I guess some dogs are like that, too.