What Commands to Teach my Dog

There really is not set amount or which commands to teach.

That all depends on what you want your dog to learn. You can have a well trained dog with as little as 3 commands, but the dog with the largest vocabulary knows over 1,000 words! This dog even knew verbs and nouns and could put them together. Pretty wild story to read about!

If you wanted to train the bare minimum, I would recommend training your dog to know Heel, Place and Down. 

When you train your dog to Heel, you are training them to come to you and walk next to you. So by teaching this, you can also use it as a replacement for the command “come” or “here” since the dog has to be right next to you in order to execute the Heel command. 

Next I would want the dog to go to a certain spot that I point to. This is where the command place comes in. We teach the dog to go to an elevated spot that we are pointing to. This is handy if you need your dog to get out of the way while you bring in the groceries, it can replace the “crate” or “kennel” command, and you can use it to play games with your pup at the park. Place is a fun and engaging command for your dog. 

The final command I would teach within a minimal program would be Down. This is a command that can take the place of Sit also. This is now a stationary position for your dog. If you are on your walk and you stop, your dog can learn to lay down. If they are running toward a busy road and a car is coming, you can tell them to down and they stop right where they are. You can use this to prevent them from bolting out of the house when you open the front door. 

Learning these three as the bare minimum will help you a lot. If your dog masters just these three commands, you will open a whole new world for them and yourself. You will be able to take them to more places, they will be able to interact with the world more instead of always being stuck at home and you get to have amazing bonding moments with them!

If you are training your dog by yourself, these are the three I would start with. Get them mastered, and then you can start adding on other commands and tricks.