I thought this would be easy. I took the treat and my dog and tried to do this step by step. I held the treat above Sweety and said “Sit”. She sat, but then she stood up again begging for the treat. I told her sit again and she did and she stayed. After that I slowly lowered the treat and she slid down to the ground. I scream “Good girl!” and I thought “Oh cool I did it!”. She only did it once, I thought that she would be able to without a treat if I pointed to the ground. I tried to say “Sweety down”. She completely ignored me and continued to beg for food. Sweety would go part of the way down, but she would leave her butt up in the air. She thought that if she only bent down to the floor that she could get the treat. Thats when ASPCA tells you to snatch away the treat, so that the dog knows that is not what you want. This is all just to prove the fact that it won’t happen instantly. I will have to practice constantly with her, making sure that she understands that when I say “lay down” she will lay down and stay there without me having to give her a treat every single time. I started testing other treats to see how she would react, and she if she would care more about those treats than the small ones that I was giving her. I found out that if I gave her the bigger ones,like a bone, she was more apt to lay down because usually dogs don’t eat their bones when they stand up. So I also started trying to gradually transition to smaller and smaller treats.
I started giving her fewer and fewer treats for a couple days. Once she got used to not having treats when she would lay down, I started teaching her the “lay down” hand sign. The “lay down” hand signal is just an open hand facing the floor while you say lay down. Do not forget that you cannot just say “down” or else your dog may confuse that with just you telling them to sit down.
It has been almost a week now and Sweety can now sit down on command. SHe used to be an annoying one year old puppy, but it just shows that with a little research and patience you can accomplish what you want to do. I would start out small and gradually go bigger for the things that you want to teach your puppy. They are still young and you should slowly teach them things, so that they can get used to you “being the boss”. I will still go to the ASPCA website to see the other tips and tricks I want to teach her, because I would recommend their site to anyone who would like to train their amazing animals. Sweety may still be a pain in the butt, but like a child she will gradually mature. I would like to thank the ASPCA website for helping me tame my pesky puppy.