The you can’t play tug with a gun dog myth

The most common misunderstanding we discuss with our students the first time we meet them is the idea that you can’t play tug with a gun dog – it will make them chew on the dummy or crush the game. We’d like to bury that myth once and for all 🙂 We use tug to teach the dog a lot of important skills – taking & holding, delivery to hand, steadiness etc. Before we teach the dog to take dummies or game we’ve tought it to switch from playing tug to carry the toy nice and calmly and deliver it to us. Then we move on to getting the dog to carry dummies and game in the same way – with a firm but calm grip. If you play tug with your dog using game it might crush the game – but we don’t play tug using game, we teach the dog that tugging is done with tug toys and both game and tug toys can be carried nice and calmly. In the video below we’ll show you how we do that.