 Going down stairs
Hello! Over the last three weeks we have been teaching Schmidtey to go up stairs. We have 15 hardwood stairs and he will now go up them without a problem. Over the last week or so we have been trying to teach him to go down the stairs but we have run in to some difficulties. We started him on the bottom step and then the second... etc. Each time we cheer him on and reward him, and he is now up to the 6th step. This is where we have run into problems... when we put him on the 7th step he freezes and we think he gets scared because he thinks he is too high. Once he gets scared there is nothing we can do to convince him to continue down. Even if we move him to the 3rd or 4th step he still freezes. We know that it is the first week of training going down stairs, and that we need to have patience, but we would appreciate any tips on how you taught your dog to go down stairs. For a background Schmidtey is 4 1/2 months old and 5.5 lbs. |