National Train Your Dog Month: Teach Your Dog How to Kiss

It’s January which means it’s National Train Your Dog Month (yes, it’s a real thing). Back in 2010, the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT) created the National Train Your Dog Month Campaign to help bring awareness to the importance of training your dog. Through a series of webinars, events and training resources, the APDT helps show that training your dog can be easy and fun! To celebrate this month (and prep for Valentine’s Day next month) we decide to explain more in detail how we taught our dog Navy how to kiss.

We first saw this trick performed by our favorite love-birds @sebastianlovesluna. If you didn’t know, Navy was Luna’s flower girl in their wedding (how cute right?). We knew we would have to teach Navy how to do this trick on her own. After watching a few YouTube videos, Navy and I got to work. Luckily, Navy learns tricks fairly fast so I believe it took us a total of 15 minutes to teach her.

We filmed our own video and provided voiceover of how we taught Navy to kiss. Give it a view and let me know what you think!

First time training with your dog? Here are a couple key tips to keep in mind:

1. Take things slow. Some dogs take a bit longer than others to learn a trick or command. We’ve been practicing “hold” with Navy for a couple months now.
2. Listen to your dog. If your dog isn’t in the mood and not eager to learn, you aren’t going to teach them anything.
3. Be consistent. Whether it is you or someone else in the house doing the training, make sure you are using the same had motions and same commands, especially when teaching a new trick.
4. Make the reward worth it. We actually don’t give Navy treats all that often. When we do, it is usually a biscuit from her treat jar. When we train with Navy, we have a special set of mouth-watering treats on reserve. We typically use any of the bite sized freeze-dried treats from Vital Essentials. Navy will do anything for them.
5. Have fun! Training time should be fun for both you and your dog. We know to take a break and stop if Navy is starting to show signs of frustration.

Soooo, have you taught your dog how to kiss? We’d love to see it! Leave a comment below or send us a message on Instagram. Happy training!