Teaching your dog to love “Leave it”

Having a dog who knows “Leave it” is especially helpful if you live in New York City! There are so many tantalizing items that might adorn the sidewalks. Chicken bones, leftover pizzas and burritos – just to name a few…

In this video, Ilana demonstrates how you can begin teaching your dog “leave it” in gradual steps.


To help ensure your dog is successful from the start, you can begin teaching leave it with a low value treat in an enclosed hand or out of reach from the dog. Once your dog begins to actively move away, even if it is just a quick head movement, from the treat, click to mark the behavior and then reinforce with a treat. After several successful trials, you can increase the difficulty of the exercise by increasing the value of the treat, like moving from kibble to a soft chewy treat, and placing it on the ground, covering the treat with your foot or hand and continuing for another series of successful trials. When your dog is successfully seeing the treat and ignoring it, you can begin adding in the cue “Leave it”  Further levels of difficulty include using higher value treats (like hot dogs!), dropping the treat on the ground or placing the treat fully open on the ground.

Training “Leave it” is a great way to continue to engage with your dog and help him learn to love to leave it… yes even that half-eaten pizza on the corner!

Anamarie Johnson
johnsonanamariec@Gmail.com

Anamarie Johnson is a PhD candidate in Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology at Arizona State University.