There are lots of useful cues that we can teach our dogs, the most important probably being the recall and reinforcing your dog for successfully coming back to you. There is another that is important, that is the ‘drop’ cue.

We don’t want to go down the route of prying things out of our dogs’ mouth (unless there is an immediate emergency), so teaching them to give things up easily is extremely useful.I know from experience that when puppies are young, that they like to take things, steal things and remove things because they look interesting or smell nice! If we try and grab and take an item off them, they will hold onto it harder, and we don’t want to teach them to escalate their behaviour to a growl.

The other mistake we make is chasing after them trying to get the item and of course, puppy thinks this is a wonderful game of, ‘I’ve got the item and catch me if you can!’So, teaching a drop cue is really important to teach at an early age. It doesn't matter what you call your ‘drop’ cue as long as your puppy/dog understands what you want and what the cue means. For example, my ‘drop’ cue is ‘Thankyou!’

Every time I say thankyou! Finley will come to me and I throw some really tasty treats on the ground for him to find, leaving the object behind. I have had to teach him this as he likes to steal socks, hats, gloves and even pants!

So, here is a step-by-step guide to teaching the drop.

Have your bum bag or pocket full of really tasty treats like some chicken, ham, sausage. When you are with your dog (on its own) in the house, randomly drop some treats and say ‘drop!’ and point them out if you need to. Lots of praise when they find them like it’s a game you are playing together. Do this multiple times.

Practice in a different room so you are changing the environment and keep it random. Notice we aren’t doing this with an object yet, we are just establishing what drop means and that the cue means go and find tasty treats.

Practice while doing things, like washing up, collecting dinner plates, getting the bag of rubbish out of the bin.

Practice while sitting down having a cup of tea or while you are working at your laptop, that way you are really generalising the behaviour and preparing for when you need it

Do a trial with something that the dog can have that is not high value, like a toilet roll or scrunched up piece of paper. Then do your drop cue and scatter some high value treats. The important thing is that you don’t immediately grab the thing they have dropped but praise again and throw a few more treats before you pick it up.

Very gradually do trial practices with other things so that your dog is getting really good at dropping the item and running straight to you for the treat scatter.

With LOTS of practice and repetitions you can start to use it for times when you really need it!

Adapted and credit to Chirag Patels-Teaching a dog to drop food, toys and other objects from their mouth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndTiVOCNY4M&t=440s