toys

Teaching your dog a solid leave it can save his life.

Imagine that you’re walking your dog on the trail and you come upon an injured wild animal. You need your dog to stay away from the animal and remain focused on you. Or, maybe your dog gets out the front door and spies a jogger running past the house — on the other side of your busy road. You don’t want your dog to approach either situation.

Teaching your dog to leave something alone — not to take it into his mouth — doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult.

It’s a relatively simple process that has just a few parts. We started teaching leave it this way.

Add in distractions.

After you’ve gotten that task accomplished, it’s time to bring the leave it skill up a notch. Here’s how we work in some distractions. When you think about it, leave it isn’t really needed unless there are distractions around!

Start by making the distraction as slight as possible. In the video, you’ll see that I wrap the raccoon tail in my hand so the toy is physically smaller and the most distracting part (that bushy tail!) is hidden from Levi.

Side note.

This toy arrived in the mail less than 24 hours before we shot this video. Right before shooting the video, I ripped the toy out of it’s wrapping. Levi’s seeing the toy for the very first time on camera. I love watching his face throughout the video — he’s definitely in love with that thing! After the video shoot, I cleaned it up, wrapped it back up and gave it to the dogs as a Christmas present! They were just as thrilled with it the second time!

Talk back: What’s the best (craziest?) thing your dog has ever left alone on request?