It's summer here now in Australia, and so that means lots of time spent at the beach with my 4yo German Shepherd, who absolutely loves the water. But the first few times he jumped off the pier down at the local river have met with hilariously disasterous "sunk like a rock" results, and he's been a bit reluctant to pier-jump ever since.
Clearly, this is a great opportunity to train him to do something he's not comfortable with - and to hopefully turn it into a fun activity for him in the process!
Working him up to the big jump
The great thing about Yahtzee is how toy-driven he is... More valuable to him than the best kind of treat you can imagine, I can get him to do just about anything if he gets a toy as a reward.
So we started off pretty slow, first making him jump off near the shore (where he could basically leap onto the shore), then moving to a little further out, and so on until he really had no choice but to jump into deeper water.
The fail - my dog outsmarted me
Unfortunately, Yahtzee is a pretty smart doggo, and if he doesn't want to do something... he's not going to do it. But he'll also figure out how to get his way. This is a trick he likes to pull whenever I try and get him to pier-jump.
Persistence pays off - great success!
Eventually we got to the point where he was desensitised enough to jumping off the pier, that I could get him almost all the way to the end.
He's still not leaping off into deep water, but we'll get there. As with most training activities, it just takes time, patience and persistence!
