Grab It

E-mailed this to Clicker Solutions today.

Something I would love to have some constructive critisim on . Baron naturally developed grabbing a toy when I told him to "Bring it to me". It amazes me and I want to fine tune this. We started out playing fetch together and it was a way for me to teach him to fetch. He use to love chasing after balls and toys and would go after them, grab them but never come back to me with it. It made for a boring game of fetch for sure. Well after reading advice I saw here I developed the rules of fetch to be if I throw it and you don't bring it back the game has ended. Baron started to bring it back to me after a while but would drop the toy a good foot or two from me. My rules were, bring it to me not drop it a foot from me so I would point at it and I would tell him "Bring it to me". After a few times he started actually picking up the toy and handing it to me!

Last week he took a new toy we bought him and carried it out to the dog kennel outside when he went potty and left the toy there. I told him him "Bring me your toy" and amazing, he went to the kennel and brought back the toy! Ok so this maybe a fluke but I decided that this is an amazing skill and I want to actually put it to work so I've started working with him on it.

So far I've decided that "Bring it to me" is too wordy and I've started with the cue of pointing at the object. I'm not 100% sure what I want the ultimate goal to be. I think I would like two goals from this. 1) I want to point to an object and he pick it up and give it to me and 2) tell him to "Grab ___ (your ball)" or "Grab my house shoes"

My current rules are

1) He has to hand the object to me.
2) He must bring it straight to me. (No running around with it for example)

Here is a video of us working on "Grab it"




So my question to everyone is

1) What cues / tricks can I develop this into?
2) Should I work this into a verbal cue and if so what ? I was thinking of adding the verbal cue "Grab it" later but I wonder how well this would work if I want to use it with multiple objects.
3) Any other suggestions on training / developing this?