Make a dog smarter!

Did you know your dog can learn approximately 100-200 words? That’s the equivalent of the vocabulary of a 2-4 year-old child. Pretty amazing, right?

But, what’s even more amazing is that you can make a dog smarter. Just like you can get smarter by exercising your brain, so can your dog. In a previous post, I talked about fun games to play with a dog and that’s one great way to make a dog smarter–by playing games that keep him engaged and learning.

Another fabulous way to make a dog smarter is to play the “Guess what I want” game. Now, ordinarily, you should be really clear with your dog about what you want him to do and when. (If you want your dog to be sitting quietly instead of jumping on you, tell him to sit.) But, when you play the “Guess what I want” game, the object of the game is for your dog to try and read your mind and guess which of his dog tricks you’d like him to perform.

When I’m playing this game with Vance, I say, “What else you got?” meaning, what other tricks do you know. And he knows that’s his cue to cycle through everything  he can think of until he comes upon the dog trick that I had in mind. Sometimes its uncanny how quickly he guesses each dog trick in a row. Other days, there’s obviously a wire short circuited somewhere between the two of us because it’s the last trick he knows several times in a row.

So, those are my two favorite ways to make a dog smarter–what are yours?