Teach My Pet To Do That! Experts explain how to make your pooch the next Pudsey

Pet Alexander

Teach My Pet To Do That’s animal trainers Nando Brown and Jo-Rosie Haffenden give their top tips for training your pets to do tricks

ITV’s quirky eight-part animal show Teach My Pet To Do That, hosted by Alexander Armstrong, sees expert animal trainers Nando Brown and Jo-Rosie Haffenden put a variety of pets and their owners through their paces by teaching them a range of tricks.

Here, Nando and Jo-Rosie give their top tips for teaching your own pets…

TEACH MY PET TO DO THAT

Give Rewards Find what the pet loves and use it to motivate them, so if your dog adores liver cake, use it to reward him for the behaviour you want. Cats often need a lot more tactile and physical affection as part of their rewards, while dogs want food and toys.

Keep training short Just doing three to five minutes of training once or twice a day is more than enough to keep your animal mentally stimulated. It’s all about patience.

Be positive You might not want a dog to bark at the door, but it is better to train them to do something you want rather than punishing what you don’t want.

Make it fun They have to enjoy the experience. An animal that wants to do a trick is always going to be better at it than an animal that is made to do it. If we came across any animals on the show that didn’t want to do something, we knew the environment wasn’t suitable for them. We had to keep their welfare at the forefront.

Bin the bowl Most animals are motivated by food in one way or another, but just giving them a food in a bowl is a waste. Throw in a few tricks and give them their food in little pieces, that will actually be better for their digestion and for their brain.

Teach My Pet To Do That premieres on Friday, August 11 at 8pm

Caren Clark

Caren has been a journalist specializing in TV for almost two decades and is a Senior Features Writer for TV Times, TV & Satellite Week and What’s On TV magazines and she also writes for What to Watch.

Over the years, she has spent many a day in a muddy field or an on-set catering bus chatting to numerous stars on location including the likes of Olivia Colman, David Tennant, Suranne Jones, Jamie Dornan, Dame Judi Dench and Sir Derek Jacobi as well as Hollywood actors such as Glenn Close and Kiefer Sutherland.

Caren will happily sit down and watch any kind of telly (well, maybe not sci-fi!), but she particularly loves period dramas like Call the Midwife, Downton Abbey and The Crown and she’s also a big fan of juicy crime thrillers from Line of Duty to Poirot.

In her spare time, Caren enjoys going to the cinema and theatre or curling up with a good book.