Should be no problem! It'd probably be easiest to use a clicker. I'd click every time he or she looks at you, and then reward. Then after a number of repetitions I'd add the name. Your yorkie should know their name down pat within a short period of time. A clicker reduces the number of repetitions needed. And dogs can learn that different words require the same response from them. If you wanted to you could teach your dog to respond to a bunch of different names.
There's lots of people who just start calling their dog a name without ever training them to respond to their name. No reward or anything for the correct response. Doing that they may, over time, learn to respond to their name, but I think they learn quicker and you get a more consistent and cleaner behaviour from them in terms of responding to their name if you teach it to them as you would the same way as training for sit, stay, come, etc. Training them to respond to their name is one of the easiest things to teach. The hard part is choosing the name. I spent so many hours trying to figure out the names for my dogs. |