A Tale of Two Kittens and One Puppy

It wasn’t easy to teach Chester drop it at first. He is much more food motivated than toy or play motivated. So I’d get him to drop it once, give him a treat — and then he’d refuse to play with the toy again; he’d just sit waiting for the next treat.

However, we’ve been working with him on fetching. He is not a natural fetcher, definitely not one of those dogs who lives with a ball in his mouth. But over time, and with a good number of treats, we’ve gotten him to the point where he enjoys a short game of fetch.

I throw his soft frisbee, tell him to “get it”, then “bring it”, and when he gets near me I tell him to “drop it”, pointing at the ground, and click and treat when he does so.

As a consequence, he’s gotten very good at “drop it” now. I’ve even managed to get him to drop a piece of food on occasion.

“Trade” is a different thing than “drop it”, although the two things are very similar. “Trade” means you get to hold onto whatever you’ve got, until I give you something great in return.

So why would I use “trade” rather than “drop it”? I have a couple of real life experiences that illustrate the difference perfectly. Chester went trotting out of the office, happily holding a pen the other day.

I knew he wouldn’t demolish the pen immediately, so rather than telling him to drop it (since I didn’t have a treat on me & he wouldn’t get rewarded for dropping it other than praise), I simply asked him to come with me, got a biscuit (something he doesn’t get often) and asked him to trade. Normally he actually does drop whatever he’s holding as soon as he sees the biscuit in my hand. Also, if you always ask him to drop something he finds, eventually he might start hiding it from you.

Another day I again saw him go running out of the office, but I couldn’t see what he had; all I could see was that he was chewing it. Something just told me it was something he shouldn’t have. So I told him to “drop it”, and he did.

Turned out it was a little piece that had broken off of his plastic nylabone. In fact, the day before he’d thrown up (very rare), and there were quite a few little blue nubbies in there — I suspect that’s what caused it.

And again, the day I found him running out of the cats’ litterbox with a piece of poop in his mouth. Obviously, I didn’t want him holding onto that (or eating it — this obssession with the litterbox is new), and he did drop it when I asked him to.

Basically, I want him to drop it immediately if I think it’s something dangerous. If it is something I don’t want him playing with, but there’s no imminent danger, then we can trade.

Don’t expect immediate success. It takes lots & lots of repetitions to get him to drop something “really” yummy (like poop — eww!).

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