Canine Freestyle Inspiration

Isn’t YouTube a wonderful thing? A few years ago, I was browsing the Internet one night and stumbled upon this YouTube video of a Canine Freestyle performance on Britain’s Got Talent.

If you don’t know or have never heard of Britain’s Got Talent, it’s a TV show in Britain where talented people from all walks of life compete against each other. They have singers, dancers, acrobats, magicians—and now even dogs!

In this particular video, the Canine Freestyle performance was by Kate and her dog, Gin. They completed dozens of jaw-dropping tricks. Everyone in the audience was completely amazed and the judges couldn’t believe that a dog could do that.

Personally, I was totally impressed with the tricks and handling displayed by Kate and Gin—so much so that I began to train my dogs to do the same tricks as in their performance. I trained my dog to stand on her hind legs and stand tall like a human. It was really fun!

But I think that when most people watch this video, they think to themselves, “This dog is great, but there’s no way that my dog could do that.”

And that’s totally untrue. In fact, Kate struggled with training her dog in the beginning. She was asked to leave every dog-training club that she joined because her dog was so badly behaved. They even told her that she was never going to be able to train her dog!

But what spirit Kate has! She was determined and did not give up. She decided to work hard at training Gin—and as a result, millions of people can now see her performance on YouTube and be inspired by it.

This story is so inspirational! If Kate could learn how to train her dog, even after being told by the “experts” that she was a lost cause, then surely you can, too!

And even if you don’t know how to train your dog yet … that’s okay! Everything begins with a thought, a desire and a vision. If your outcome is to train your dog to do really cool tricks, then there’s a way to train your dog to do them.

It’s kind of funny: a while back someone had asked me on the www.dogtrickacademy.com discussion forum how they could train their dog to jump rope. With my limited imagination, I told them that it was impossible because dogs weren’t human. A few days later, another member posted a video of their dog jumping rope. My belief that it was impossible had clouded my perception of what was actually possible.

I now believe that you can train a dog to do anything you want. So don’t believe it when someone tells you that you can’t train your dog—because you can!

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