Golden Retriever Dog action shot of him wiping his front paws on a rug. Last week, I taught George the basics of wiping his paws. I did this by first hiding a treat within a rug, and rewarding him when he dug at the rug. Slowly, he had associated this movement with a reward. Next, I had moved on to rewarding him by doing that motion on a flat rug, and only treating after he had completed the movement. Lastly, I introduced him to the routine of wiping his paws after entering the house from outside.                                       

Ever since he demonstrated an understanding of this trick, I haven’t practiced a structured training routine. Instead, every time he entered the house, I would point at the rug and say “wipe” and he would wipe his paws. I am hopeful that soon he will do this as an automatic movement, but I believe this would be built from routine, rather than structured  training.                                                 

I was researching further into how to train him to wipe his back paws, but I was unsuccessful in my research. My closest findings were from Training Tip Tuesday: Teach Your Dog To Wipe Their Feet by Trudog, who noted that “Once you’ve mastered wiping front feet, you can move on to rear feet as well to keep your floors sparkling clean.” Despite them being the only resource to mention the back paws, they only instructed the next step, rather than detailing how to teach that step. I have decided to focus solely on implementing a routine of wiping his paws without instruction, rather than introducing him to additional steps.

Instead of integrating a video of George’s progress, which has been very similar to the end product of last week’s video, I decided to instead add an “action shot” of him wiping his feet today. The multi-media strategy I used was “alt text” so that my image was accessible for a wider audience.