Training Your Pet to Become a Bed Bug Dog

By Chloe Gib


If bedbugs have been troubling your home and you have problems locating their hiding place, the good news for you is that you can train your dog to fish them out for you. Thus, you do not need to fumigate the whole house blindly simply because you want to get rid of bugs. By the time you complete the training process below, you would have trained your dog to become a bed bug dog.

To start with, you will need up to five saltshakers. Once you have the saltshakers on ground, place several bedbugs in three of the five shakers. You should also place the eggs, fecal matter and skin casting of bedbugs in one of the remaining two saltshakers and leave the other one empty. However, if you do not have access to an infested area in your home, you can easily purchase some from an entomologist or a bed bug inspector in your location.

After putting the training material in place, you may then bring in the pet that you want to train. Get the pet to sniff the shakers that has the bugs in them. You should restrict the dog to sniffing only the bugs so that it does not get confused.

Thereafter, take your dog out of the training room and close the door to prevent it from seeing what you are doing in doors. After shutting it out, hide all of the shakers in different location in the room. Thereafter open the door and let it enter.

The fourth step is to issue a particular command to the pet to start searching for bedbugs. You need to understand that only one command will work best for this purpose. Hence, if you use the word seek to train the pet to sniff out bugs, this is the same command that you should use each time you want the pet to expose bugs in the house.

One important step of the training is rewarding the dog and reinforcing it positively when it locates the shakers. However, the reward should be given only if the dog is able to locate the shakers. If locates the empty shaker or the one that has the fecal matter, just ignore it. This will make it know that you want it to fish out the live bugs.

By the time you completed the last step, you would have successfully trained your pet to become a bed bug dog. However, you may need to repeat the whole process a number of times for the pet to master the training. You may increase the intensity of the training by hiding the shakers in more difficult places within the house.




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