Best Advanced Tricks To Challenge Your Smart Aussiedoodle

Aussiedoodles are known for their intelligence and their fun-loving nature. Teaching them advanced tricks is a great way to showcase these traits.

Your dog can be taught so many amazing tricks that you are really only limited by your imagination. Dogs can be taught to respond to play games, they can learn the names of their toys and they can even learn to talk. Dogs can do so much more than we once thought.

These advanced tricks tap into what we are now learning about canine cognition. These types of tricks don’t just look impressive, it will let you see how your dogs interpret the world around them. Even though we know our dogs are smart, watching your dogs learn these tricks will impress and surprise you.

I recently took a canine cognition class with one of my dogs and it really shook up the way I looked at what my dogs could learn. Having been a pet dog trainer for more than two decades, we are now discovering that dogs can understand more than I ever thought possible. And teaching these tricks will help enrich your aussiedoodle’s cognition abilities.

Can I Teach My Aussiedoodle To Identify Their Toys?

Yes, your dog can learn to identify toys by their names. This is a great trick that combines cognition with play, giving dogs both a mental and physical outlet.

The key to this trick is repetition. The first few tricks may take some time. Persistence will pay off.  Commit to several short sessions (2-3 minutes) a day.

• Start with just one toy. Decide on the toy’s name. For this example, toy #1 will be named “Teddy”.
• Hide the toy behind your back and get your dog’s attention. Say “Teddy” and pull the toy out from behind your back. Most dogs will sniff the toy, but even if they just look at it, tell your dog “yes” and follow up with a treat. Repeat!
• After a few sessions your dog will be excited to play the game. Then it is time to add another toy. So you repeat the above steps with toy #2, giving the toy a different name.
• After a few sessions with toy #2, pull out both toys and ask for “Teddy”. To set your dog up to succeed, you want “Teddy” to be closer to your dog than toy #2. We are asking your dog to discriminate between the two toys, which is brand new and we want them to have fun with the game. You can make it tougher after they start catching on.
• Do the same with toy #2.
• In other sessions, you can start playing with the toys. Get your dog amped up and toss the toy a short distance. Tell your dog to “Go Get Teddy!” Celebrate when they play with the toy. 
• As your dog is successful you can start making the game harder, like putting both toys right in front of your dog. If your dog is not successful, that is ok! Just make sure you set up the next repetition to be easier.

As your dog gets better, you can name other toys too. Eventually you can put multiple toys out and call out the toy’s name. Guests will be impressed when your dog can select each toy by its name.

Is your dog picking up names quickly? Then you may want to volunteer for the Genius Dog Challenge. A fun challenge that is also helping to provide research about dog cognition and communication.

Can My Dog Learn Colors?

There is a common misconception that dogs only see in black and white. This is not true. 

While they don’t share our whole spectrum of colors they do see some variations, particularly in yellow and blue hues. This video explains it more thoroughly.

So you can teach a dog to discriminate between objects that are blue and yellow. In a class I took, our instructor handed out red (which they see as gray), yellow and blue cups. But I have seen people do the same exercise with plates and flying discs.

The steps are the same as the toy identification exercise. You are just using the colors instead of names. Make sure the objects you pick to train with are identical, except for the color.

As they are successful with the item you picked (ie.-if you used cups) then you want to repeat the exercise with another object (ie-plates) to help the dog start to understand that they are looking at the color on each object.

Can I Teach My Dog To  Play Sports?

Yes, and better yet, you can teach them how to make up their own game using concepts called behavior capturing and free shaping.

Capturing is waiting for your dog to offer behaviors naturally. When they offer a behavior you want to put on cue, you mark it (with a clicker or verbal marker) and follow up with a reward.

Free shaping is breaking your end goal into smaller steps. You will capture the first step several times, and then wait for the behavior to progress for additional reinforcement.

For this exercise, we will not have an end goal in mind. The dog will determine the end behavior, although we can guide it by deciding what to capture with our marker and rewards. We will just shape bigger behaviors as the dog catches on to the game.

I train my dogs to play with things like soccer balls, and footballs using a training plan based on a popular game most trainers play at some point in their career. It is called 101 Things to Do with a Box and was popularized by animal trainer and author Karen Pryor.

I liked introducing this concept to my training students, as a way to show them how easy it can be to capture cool behaviors. But only a few saw the point of getting their dog to interact with a box.

So to build excitement, I decided to take the concepts this exercise uses, and apply them to a football. Before introducing this in class, I played around with this using my own dog. 

My first step was to capture any interaction with the ball. Many dogs will nose at it, although at first, I would be willing to capture a glance toward the ball. My dog decided to play bow at it. 

I reinforced that until he was repeating this behavior each time I put the football down. Then I withheld my marker for just 1-2 seconds. He started jumping into a stand, causing the football to fly behind him. It looked like he was hiking the ball. 

It became his most impressive trick, and it was easy to build.

But not everyone is a football fan! I had a client whose dog desperately needed more exercise. Mom was getting stressed, so I wanted to try to get the whole family interested in playing more with the dog. The kids in the house loved soccer. Which gave me an idea.

I took the dog and a soccer ball into the yard. I softly kicked the ball to the side of the dog. She loved the movement and went to stop it with her foot. I captured that! We played more like this, and gradually built up more excitement to stop the ball.

Again, I withheld my marker. She did not want the game to end, so she nosed at the ball. I marked and rewarded that. Pretty soon she would nose the ball even harder.

When she was reliably nosing the ball after stopping the ball, I upped the criteria. I wanted her to nose it back to me. I wanted the end behavior to be the dog and human passing the ball back and forth. So I only marked and treated when she pushed the ball in my direction. 

This step took a little longer to build, but with time and persistence she got the game. She had a cool new way to get exercise, while impressing everyone who watched her.

Free shaping and capturing are concepts that really help our dogs learn to think and problem solve.

Can My Dog Learn To Talk?

Videos of dogs using buttons pre-programed with words are gaining popularity on social media platforms, because it really does look like they have attached understanding to those words. But is it realistic to think that they understand?

That is open for debate. And plenty of scientists are debating it! But the videos are compelling enough to inspire more research, particularly by the  Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego.

The catalyst for this new trend was the book How Stella Learned to Talk by speech pathologist Christina Hunger. She created buttons for her dog , Stella, based on adaptive equipment she used with some of her patients.

But the most famous talking dog has to be Bunny the talking sheepadoodle. Her Youtube channel has a large collection of videos showcasing Bunny and her owner communicating.

So if you are interested in giving this a try, you want to start small. You can purchase buttons on Amazon where you can record your own words. 

Before you add any words, you want to teach your dog to target the button with their paw. If you have taught a shake, you can hold the button in your hand, mark and treat them when they hit the button (thinking they are shaking), and slowly move it to the floor.

If they don’t know how to shake, try putting treats under the button. Most dogs will paw at the item on top of the treat to get to it. Mark and treat each time their paw hits the target. 

When your aussiedoodle is reliably hitting the button, you can record a word. Start with something easy, I suggest “outside”.  Put something visual on the button (such as a sticker with the word “out”) so as you add buttons, it will help your dog discriminate which button to push for each activity.

Put the button at the door and ask your dog to hit the button, then take them outside. Some users suggest that you hit the button first, in hopes that your dog will model your behavior. Do this every time you take your dog out.

As your dog starts hitting the button on their own, you want to add more, gradually and starting with easy words, such as “play” or “treat”. 

Be prepared to put these buttons out of reach if the activity they suggest is not an option for the dog at that moment. In the beginning, you don’t want the dog to ever hit the button and not get what they are asking for, as consistency and reward are vital parts of making an association between the button and the thing they are asking for.

If you believe your dog has a knack for language, you may even want to volunteer for the  Comparative Cognition Lab studies on canine linguistics which may  help us find out even more about canine communication.