Greyhound Training for Teaching Your Rehomed Pet How To Use Stairs

If your home has stairs, then you need to know that that is a dilemma for your greyhound. For most dogs, stairs are a totally bewildering puzzle. Some dogs can handle them, and for some reason, others cannot; rehomed greyhounds belong to this second group, for the reason that they spend the first four active years of their lives purely in kennels and racetracks. So this means that, as the owner of a greyhound, you will need to have some greyhound training ready to help out your dog master negotiating stairs.

1. Obviously, forcing your dog up or down the stairs is the most effective thing for breaking the dog's trust in you and in training, so please do away with force or coercion.

2. Be patient in training your dog, yet do not simply give up and think it will take the dog years. Do not train for extended periods of time. Work with the dog for 5-minute sessions, which have hour-long gaps in between.

3. Going up - Get a second person to bait your dog up the stairs with a piece of cheese or doggie treat, thus giving your dog more enticing reasons to learn how to go up. The person behind the dog - it could be you - is reassuring the dog it will not fall. If the dog won't mind, hold its front left paw and place it on the second step. Then take the dogs back right leg and put it on the first step. Then put the dog's front right leg on the second stair next to the left one. Take the dog's back left leg and put it on the first step next to the back right one.

4. Learning how to go down the stairs is even more dangerous since greyhounds are used to bounding out of their kennel crates. A greyhound may just - and it surely will if there is no intervention - attempt to jump to the bottom of the stairs in one go.

5. When going down the stairs for the first couple of days, hold your new greyhound by its collar, with your other hand supporting the dog by its chest. To start your dog going down, you may need to gently put it on the first or second step.

6. Do not allow without supervision the dog to try out going down the stairs on its own, until countless practices together with you indicate that the dog fully understands the idea of one step at a time.

7. With the help of greyhound training, it is rare that greys fail mastering going up and down stairs. Some simply take time learning.