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Swap It Skills

Teach your dog to swap or trade an item when they have something you don’t want them to. This can be useful for curious puppies, new rescues investigating the house and emergencies.

Essentially if your dog grabs the remote and thinks it's the funnest, new crunchy toy, if we grab this out of their mouth it can be scary for your dog, confusing and lead to a dog reacting aggressively. When we swap something for the same or higher value we reduce the likelihood of the dog reacting to why we took their new fun toy away.

  1. Give your dog a toy to play with
  2. Show your dog a treat
  3. As soon as they leave/drop the toy say “yes” and give them the treat
  4. Practice this until they are able to reliably do it and then add in the word “swap it” once they pick up the item/toy, then reinforce them once again when they drop it and choose to come over to the treat.

Top tips:

  • Repetition - keep practising and reinforcing the behaviour
  • Reward with high value treats 
  • Have treat jars around the house so you can grab them as needed

Disclaimer:

Be mindful when you train and interact with your pet to avoid all aversive & balanced training techniques. When animals are hurt and scared, they may stop the behaviour but they won’t learn the right thing to do. 

Aversive training consists of: yelling/scaring pets, leash jerking, hitting, using choke collars, e-collars, prong collars or slip leads, using water such as spraying cats, 

Force-free training focuses on positive reinforcement which promotes trust, confidence and consistent behaviour with our causing harm or stress to our pets. This is the most up to date, science backed Humane method of training.