Teach Your Chihuahua to Find Hidden Treats

This exercise gives your Chihuahua the opportunity to find hidden treats in increasingly hard to access places. Instead of hiding treats around the room, you’re going to try a succession of upturned cups and bowls, boxes, and so on to test his ingenuity in actually accessing the treats.

The simplest versions of this game don’t need verbal cues. Your Chihuahua will have plenty of motivation; it’s his dexterity and determination that are being put to the test. Most dogs enjoy a variety of different challenges and formats when they are finding the treat.

Follow these simple steps:

1. Take three plastic cups and, with your Chihuahua watching, place them upside down with a treat under each one. Then lean back and encourage your Chihuahua to approach and find the treats. He’ll have to push the cups over, which is harder than it sounds with only a nose and his paws at his disposal.
2. When he’s dealt with the cups, try the same arrangement again, but this time using plastic bowls. These are harder to turn over, because your dog can’t use their height to get the purchase to push them over, they tend to slide along the floor. Most dogs eventually figure out that they need to push down with their nose and flick with their paw at the same time – if your Chihuahua has been trying for a while and is getting frustrated, help him a little with the first bowl, and then see if he can manage the others.
3. Still not too hard, but a slightly different approach – put a treat in a square of newspaper, crumple it up, and push it into an empty toilet-paper or paper-towel tube. Your dog will either have to tear up the tube and then the newspaper or push the newspaper through the tube.

This activity will challenge your Chihuahua and keep him engaged while he figures it out.

Once your Chihuahua has dealt with cups, bowls, and newspapers, you can offer him the same challenge in a slightly harder format. Using sealed plastic containers means that he has to indicate the treat and get you to open the container and get it out for him. Your Chihuahua will be looking to you for teamwork.

Offer some tougher find-the-treat puzzles that he’ll have to work with you to solve.

1. Take three plastic lidded food containers and use a hole punch to cut a small hole in the top of each. Put a treat—preferably a strong-smelling one—in one of the containers.
2. Lay out the containers in a line and show them to your Chihuahua. He’ll sniff around them and quickly establish which has the treat in it. Ask him to “Mark It”—you want him to put his paw on the container with the treat in it. As soon as he touches the container with his paw (even if he’s actually trying to paw it open), use the cue (click if you’re using a clicker), open the container, and give him the treat.
3. Try some different variants. Put treats in two of the containers but not the third, and ask him to “Mark It” again—this time, twice. Then put different treats in all three containers, and see which one he cues first. You can enjoy yourselves with this exercise. Your dog is bound to engage with as many different versions as you can devise, because he’s guaranteed a treat at the end of it.

This activity requires teamwork and will strengthen the bond between you and your Chihuahua.

Using a Tennis Ball

Using a tennis ball as a treat container will take some dexterity to crack. Use a sharp knife to make a long slit in the side of a tennis ball, then place a couple of treats inside and give it to your dog. He needs to work out the right amount of pressure to apply—and the right angle at which to apply it—to make the treats fall out of the ball.

This is a homemade variant on the many commercial treat balls you can buy, but it’s more challenging than most. It’s appropriate for smaller dogs only, like your Chihuahua and you should always supervise your dog while he’s working on the tennis ball—put it away if you’re not present.