I’m working on teaching AttackDog some dumb tricks -
One is to drop down dead at the command ‘Bang’
Two is to point at what ever is in front of us, at the command ‘Show me’. The idea is you say in a wine store for example, “Show me a good shiraz” , and he’ll appear to point one out.
Three is to growl on command. My brother had a dog that would growl on the command ‘easy’, which made the dog appear to be just barely restrained, since his owner kept saying ‘easy’, and he’d keep growling more.
I do have a cat who fetches a stick. Thing is, it’s not so much a thing you train a cat to do as a thing you can’t train a cat NOT to do.
Several years ago I was blessed with a Gordon Setter named Fancy who DELIGHTED in learning… tricks amused her greatly. She was a registered therapy dog and we belonged to a group that visited nurning homes, schools, hospital, libraries etc and visited, showed our skits, and educated.
One of the other girls had a Samoyed named Stolli, and together,m we taught Fancy and Stolli to play leapfrog. Fancy would lie down, Stolli would jump over her and immideately lie down on the other side, where Fancy would jump up & over Stolli, lie down, and they would do this all the way across the room. It never failed to bring wild applause.
She would also pick up and retrieve to me anything-and I do mean ANYTHING- I gave the hand signal and command for, including coins and small slips of paper (like dollar bills) which are very hard for a dog to hold & carry.
God, I miss that dog.
I would have applauded wildly if I’d seen that! 
My wife taught one of our dogs to high-five for a cookie. Now, when he wants whetever we’re eating, he’ll just walk up and start high-fiving the air to let us know!
My Black Lab would do this on the “Watch Him/Her” command, it was pretty intimidating to be on the other side I was told. The strange part was I have no idea how she learned it, just for the record she was a big baby and would never bite anyone.
I need to teach my dogs some of these tricks! That leapfrogging sounds awesome!
I have 3 - one will shake hands with barely being told, the second has to be told twice, and the third you still have to grab his paw, he won’t offer it to you. Yeah, I pretty much failed at dog training.
Oh well - they luvs their mama and that’s what matters to me!
My dog Pintsize can do this. He flops on his back and puts his paws up, as if saying, “don’t kill me.”
I want to teach him “play dead” now.
That is great.
We have a Doberman who knows the command “heel”. But being her stubborn self, she usually obeys it the first time by sitting slightly in front of us. When we repeat the command, she corrects herself by scooching backwards on her butt. It’s so cute, I hope she never learns to do it right the first time.
We’re also trying to teach her to fart on command (because that would be the next best thing to having bees fly out of her mouth). She seems to get the idea, but lacking butt cheeks, she can’t always push out a noise. If we command her to sit first and then fart (especially in the early afternoon or late evening), she usually performs it well.
My dog does that with “shake”: if I tell her to sit and she thinks/knows I have a treat, she automatically lifts her paw. I guess I over-trained “shake.” So now I’m working on getting her to only shake on command. When she lifts her paw uncommanded I say “no, just sit”: she puts her paw down, then she gets the treat.
My Eskie (may he rest in peace) learned “other way” when we lived in an apartment when he was a pup. We’d go out for walks, and inevitably, he’d try to walk the wrong way around a sign or a tree, and I’d say “other way” and he’d come back around it the right way.
not really a trick, just job training – but I attended a sheep dog trial once (like in Babe). Amazing…apparently just with a series of whistles & gestures, the dogs round up sheep and push them in the desired direction.
The only trick my dogs know is how to scatter across the linoleum, when you trip over them and say “Dammit, why do you always have stand right behind me.”
One of my Labs knows this one, but as she gets older the “shot” apparently doesn’t hurt as much since it takes her a little longer to lay down.
She also knows “FIRE!” where she will Stop, Drop, and Roll.
I can’t take credit for either though because she came with these tricks. She and her sister were a rescue… not from a bad situation, but from a good family that had a life change that wasn’t the best to include two big dogs. So we have had to love them for the last 5 years or so.
I saw one of these. Guy had a towel on the refrigerator door. Dog went and pulled the door open by biting the towel in pulling, grabbed a beer out of the lower shelf and brought it to his owner. Owner said, “WAIT! What did you forget?”
…dog went back and closed the fridge.
My mastiff mix knows play dead, but when you “shoot” her, first she’ll stop, at the second bang she sits and at the third one she keels over. It’s like she’s saying, “One shot ain’t gonna do it, Dad.”
Both she and my late, lamented Rott/Lab mix learned “go left, go right,” and “excuse me.” Excuse me means, “You’re in my way and would you please move?”
The mastiff also has the full range of attack/protection commands. My favorite is to have her go into bluff and bluster mode on a subtle hand signal when the door-to-salespeople/evangelists are a little too reluctant to leave. It looks for all the world like I’m straining to hold her back, even though she’d never move without her attack command.
I’ve also taught her to bow when she wants to go out/come in and to leave the room when I tell her.
Both she and my English bulldog are poison proofed. They won’t take a treat or pick anything off the ground without a specific command. It’d originally taught that to my R/L when I lived in a worse neighborhood and some lunatic was going around tossing antifreeze soaked hamburger balls over back fences.