Dogs Ringing Bells

It’s surprisingly hard to find large jingle bells. A few years ago I really wanted some so that we could do holiday-themed tricks during part of a December group class. After four craft stores I was finally successful and we had fun teaching the dogs to nose target the bells. It was a very easy behavior to do that looks impressive and we had very fast results.

Here’s some training I did (taking a lot of short cuts) with my dogs that year to get them to ring bells. They already knew targeting (nose touching a prop) which would easily result in ringing the bell. The harder part was to get one dog to hold the bell very still!