Training your dog to use a treadmill

So, I got to visit Buddy today. He’s my guinea-pig dog. I don’t often get to work with a dog that hasn’t had my sort of training, but most of the time, I’m training him from scratch. Today, I just wanted to see how he was coming along with the sitting and waiting for his food (he’s doing SO well with that) and with sitting in general. He still jumps a lot, but that is to be expected as he is a puppy. Though, today I decided to see if I could walk Buddy. It was difficult because I’m short and he’s a lab and you’ve got to have the leash high on his neck or it’s a lost cause. But I had the leash pretty high and tight and it worked out pretty well. He got the gist of it quickly but my bicep got a lot of exercising.


Then I realized that my friend had a tread mill. So I decided that I would gradually get to train Buddy to walk on it since that’s something I’ve definitely never trained before but I have seen it done. I also think it would be great since Buddy needs far more exercise than my friend has time to give and since he can’t walk both dogs together it would be nice for him to put Buddy on the treadmill sometimes and just let him walk for awhile. It’s best to have two treadmills, but one will do.

I started out with training Buddy to get on the treadmill. I would motion to it and say “Up.” And then once he got on, I would say “Sit” and then give him the treat. I did that a fair amount of times, but then I got excited and I tried to see if he’d just take to it and walk automatically, but he didn’t. Though, he did try to get on it while I was walking on it to get him used to the sound. I told Martin (my friend) to simply practice having him get on the treadmill and sit and then soon I’ll go back out there and we can work on actually getting him to walk on it.

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