Dachshund Saturday morning at the park, and your sausage dog is dragging you toward a picnic blanket full of strangers while you shout a name that clearly means nothing to him. Leash tangled. Sandwiches at risk. Somebody’s toddler screaming with delight.
Now rewind that same morning with nine words already installed in his brain.
He trots beside you. He sits when you stop. He looks up when you say his name, checks in, and carries on being the smug little log he was always destined to be.
That gap between the two versions is not luck or breeding. It is training, and dachshunds need it more than almost any breed people casually call "small."
Why Dachshunds Make Training Feel Like a Negotiation
These dogs were bred to go down a badger hole alone and make life-or-death decisions without a human anywhere nearby.
Independence is not a bug in the dachshund. It is the entire original job description.
Which means your doxie is not ignoring you because he is dim. He is ignoring you because he ran the numbers, weighed your request against the smell coming from under the shed, and the shed won.
A dachshund does not obey. A dachshund agrees. Your job is to make agreeing the most appealing option in the room.
Keep sessions short, three to five minutes, a few times a day. Long drills bore them, and a bored dachshund invents his own curriculum.
Before You Start
Cut treats tiny. Pea-sized, soft, and smelly.
Their backs matter too, so avoid asking for anything that involves jumping or twisting during training. We will come back to that.
1. Name Recognition
Everything else stands on this one.
Say the name once, in a bright voice, and the instant those ears swivel, mark it with a "yes" and pay up.
The mistake most owners make is burning the name out. If you have chanted "Bruno, Bruno, BRUNO" across a field forty times, Bruno has learned his name is background noise, like a fridge hum.
Say it once. Make it mean something wonderful. Never use it as a scolding word.
Practice Setup
Start in a quiet room with zero competition. Then add distractions gradually: the TV on, a toy on the floor, the back door open.
2. Sit
The easy win, and the one that buys you calm in a hundred small moments.
Hold a treat at nose height, lift it slowly back over the head, and the rear end drops on its own. No pushing on the hips, ever, and that goes double for a long-backed dog.
Once the motion is reliable, drop the lure and use the word alone.
Sit becomes your default "what do I do now?" button. Door about to open? Sit. Dinner arriving? Sit. Guest walking in? Sit, in theory, on a good day.
3. Down
Harder than sit for most dachshunds, because it puts them in a position they consider tactically vulnerable.
Lower a treat from the nose straight to the floor between the front paws, then slide it forward along the ground like you are drawing a line away from them.
The elbows follow. The belly lands. Party time.
Some dogs stall halfway. Reward the halfway, then ask for a little more next round.
Why It Earns Its Place
Down is the position of settling. A dog in a down at your feet in a cafe is a dog who is not barking at every ankle that walks past.
4. Stay
Stay is not one command so much as three separate skills stacked together: duration, distance, and distraction.
Work them one at a time or the whole thing collapses.
Start with duration. One second, treat. Three seconds, treat. Ten seconds, treat. Only then take a single step back, and go straight back to one second.
Every time you add a new challenge, make the other two easier. That single rule prevents ninety percent of stay-training frustration.
Release with a word. "Okay" or "free" or "break." Without a release, your dog decides when stay is over, and it will be sooner than you hoped.
5. Come
The command that can genuinely save a life, and the one dachshunds treat as optional.
Poison the recall once and you will spend a year fixing it. So the golden rule: coming to you must never, ever end in something the dog dislikes.
Never call your dachshund to be put in a crate, bathed, or have nails clipped. Go and get him for those. Keep the word clean.
Build it as a game indoors first. Two people, opposite ends of a hallway, calling in turn, jackpotting every arrival with something outrageous like cheese or roast chicken.
Take It Outside Slowly
Use a long line, fifteen or twenty feet, in a quiet space. Freedom without a safety net is how recalls get broken.
And when he does come back, even slowly, even after a delay, celebrate like he just returned from the moon. Punishing a slow return teaches him not to return at all.
6. Leave It
Dachshunds are nose-led vacuum cleaners with legs.
Leave It is the difference between a nice walk and an emergency vet bill after your dog inhales a chicken bone off the pavement.
Teach it with two hands. Closed fist holds a boring treat, and the dog sniffs, licks, paws, and eventually backs off. The moment he backs off, he gets a better treat from the other hand.
The lesson lands fast: ignoring the thing in front of me produces something superior.
Progress to a treat on the floor under your palm, then uncovered, then on walks with real-world temptations.
7. Drop It
Different job from Leave It, and both are needed.
Leave It says do not take that. Drop It says give me what is already in your mouth.
Trade, never wrestle. Offer something equal or better, mark the release, and hand back the original item when it is safe to do so.
That last part matters more than people realise. If Drop It always ends with the item being confiscated forever, your dachshund starts a career in resource guarding, and dachshunds are frankly quite good at it.
8. Off
Not "down," which you have already used for lying down. "Off" means remove yourself from that thing.
Sofa, bed, lap, unfortunate visiting relative.
This one is genuinely medical for the breed. Repeated jumping down from height compresses those famously long spines, and intervertebral disc disease is the condition every doxie owner should be quietly training around.
Teaching "off" is not about manners. It is about protecting a spine that was engineered for tunnels, not furniture.
Pair it with ramps or pet steps so "off" means walking down a slope rather than launching into the void.
Lure with a treat tossed to the floor at first, add the word as the movement happens, and fade the lure once the pattern is clear.
9. Wait
Wait is stay’s more casual cousin, and you will use it constantly.
At doors, at kerbs, at the top of stairs, at the boot of the car.
Stay means freeze here until I release you. Wait means pause, hold this spot, something is about to happen.
The Doorway Drill
Reach for the handle. If your dog surges forward, the hand comes off the handle. Try again.
Door opens an inch, dog holds position, door opens wider. Any forward movement rewinds the whole sequence.
It takes a handful of repetitions before the penny drops, and then you have a dog who does not bolt into a road because a squirrel had the audacity to exist.
Putting the Nine Together
Do not attempt all of these in one week. Pick two, get them solid in three environments, then add another.
Solid means the dog responds the first time, in the kitchen, in the garden, and out on a real walk with real distractions. Anything less is a work in progress, and that is completely fine.
Train before meals when motivation is high. End every session while your dachshund still wants more, because stopping at the peak is what keeps him showing up eager tomorrow.
And expect regression. There will be a Tuesday where he forgets what "sit" means and stares at you like you have started speaking Latin.
That is not failure. That is a badger dog reminding you who negotiated the original contract.