Teach Your Dog to Play Hide and Seek in 5 Easy Steps

Our first dog was very much a couch potato, but our second dog is much more energetic and always wants to play. Trips to the dog park are an every-day occurrence, but when you do something every day, you tend to get a little bored of it.

At some point, we decided to play a trick on her, and when she was off zooming around with her dog friends, we ducked behind a tree to hide. It was hilarious watching her look around and realize we were gone.

Of course, it only took her a scant few seconds to dial in on our scent and track us down. But that's when we realized, we could make a game out of this! That's what inspired us to start teaching our dogs how to play hide and seek.

This is a story from one of my customers, and I absolutely love it. Some of the best interactions we have with our furry friends are accidental, and this is a great example. What started as an idle trick turned into a lifelong game centered on enrichment.

Now, if there was any hint of actual abandonment, or if their dog had been abandoned before, this would be an emotionally devastating move, and I wouldn't recommend it. But for many dogs, dogs who are secure in knowing they're loved and have a stable home, hide and seek is a great game to play.

How can you teach your pup to play hide and seek? Fortunately, there's a much better way than just trying to hide from them at the local dog park.

How to Teach Hide and Seek in 5 Easy Steps

Let's dig right in. Training hide and seek is super easy, and you can do it with just five steps.

Step 1: Train the Stay Command

"Stay" is one of the more challenging tricks to train into a puppy when they're young, since they basically have puppy ADHD and will have trouble focusing for more than a few seconds at a time. As they get more used to it, it becomes a lot easier to train. It also helps if you start with "sit" and build up from there.

Training "stay" isn't too hard. Ask them to sit or lie down, and tell them to stay. Give them a treat while they sit in place and move on. Repeat later, and gradually increase how long before you give them the treat, a few seconds at a time. Make sure to assign a "break" command to release them; you don't want to rely on "come" or another command, or you mix the tricks.

Once they can sit for at least 10-15 seconds without moving, you can start to add distance. Take a step away, and as long as they don't immediately follow, reward them. Increase the distance and time, and eventually you'll have a dog that sits in place until you say otherwise.

Step 2: Hide Somewhere Simple

Truthfully, for the simplest possible hide and seek, you're already done. Your pup is already more than happy to come find you when you call, so teaching them how to stay and then releasing them to come find you is basically all there is to it.

For the simple game, at least.

It helps if you have a couple of treats in a pocket. Hide somewhere, starting somewhere simple, and call your pup. Once you release them from the "stay" and they come for you, don't call or encourage them, or that gives the game away. When they find you, reward and praise them.

Sometimes, your pup might look for you for a bit, then give up and go find something else to do. If that happens, just go about your business as usual. No reward, no praise, just your day-to-day. When you try again, find an easier place to hide.

The goal, for the record, is to gradually hide in trickier places, to ramp up the difficulty and keep your pooch engaged.

Step 3: Name and Imprint Items

This is where hide and seek really turns into a fun game.

First, identify things you know your dog can recognize. A handful of favorite toys, like squeakers and distinct plushies, are good options. Each one can be given a name, something relatively distinctive with no overlap with other toys. Don't just call it their ball unless they only have one ball. Name the plushies. Whatever they like, use for the trick.

To teach your dog the name of an item, just repeat the name whenever they interact with it. They'll associate the name with the toy, and you can say things like "go get your bunbun!" and they'll find their rabbit plush, or whatever.

To affirm the training, set up a handful of toys scattered around the floor. Ask your dog to retrieve a toy by name, and reward them if they get the right one. Repeat until they know the names of a handful of toys.

Step 4: Hide and Seek with Items

Now you're ready to put the two together.

Start by telling your dog to sit and stay. Then, walk to somewhere a few paces away with one of their toys. Set the toy down in plain view and return to their side. Tell them to go get the toy. If they do, great! Reward time. If they don't, move it closer and try again.

As they get used to this, move the toy further away. Hide it slightly around the corner, where they can see you hiding it, and gradually hide it further and further away.

Be careful not to accidentally encourage bad behavior. For example, if your dog isn't allowed on your bed, don't hide their toy under your sheets.

Step 5: Expand Into Scents

At this point, you already have a solid hide-and-seek routine, and it can work with anything your dog knows. I've seen it work with toys, with kids, with objects they happen to like, and all sorts of things.

To get even more interesting, you can expand into scent work. Scent work is basically the same as hide and seek, except you change up the item randomly to something your dog doesn't know. The way they find it is by scent, which you mark using a scent marker like a dog-safe essential oil.

Do you need to go this far? Of course not. Is it interesting and fun? Of course!

The Benefits of Hide and Seek

Now, other than having a fun new game to play with your pooch, what are the benefits of teaching hide and seek? Good news! There are quite a few, actually.

First of all, it's a pretty easy game to play indoors, as long as you don't live in a studio apartment. The internet is packed with videos of people playing some variation of hide and seek in just a few rooms, hiding behind doors, under beds, in closets, or under blankets. Some dogs are clever and find them right away, while others are bamboozled for minutes at a time.

The perk here is that it works as an entirely indoor game, which makes it a great game to play when the weather is nasty and you don't want to go outside.

Another huge benefit is that it tends to be a very cognitive game. Some dogs have a seemingly endless supply of energy and will happily run themselves to the point of exhaustion with purely physical games. A neighbor of mine, for example, had two German Shepherds, and he could play fetch with them for hours, and they would never get tired of it.

For dogs like that, it's basically impossible to use a physical game to wear them out in time for bed. You need something that challenges their mind as well as their body. Hide and Seek challenges their patience, their mentality, their ability to listen to commands, and their focus on a task. It's very mental and works great to tire out a rambunctious pup.

Of course, hide and seek can be physical, too. If you're hiding up or down a flight of stairs and on the other end of your house, and you get them to run back and forth, it works them out.

Hide and seek is also a scent game. Since your pup can't find you by sight, and you'll be keeping quiet, they have to track you down by your scent. And, since your home is saturated with your scent already, they need to figure out where the fresh scent is coming from, which can be even more of a challenge.

Not bad for something so easy to train, eh?

Things to Know About Hide and Seek with Dogs

Since hide and seek is so simple and easy to train, I wanted to cover some other details before we go our separate ways across this blog.

Are there any downsides to hide and seek?

Unfortunately, yes. Hide and seek is a great game, but it's not appropriate for every dog. There are a handful of reasons why it might not be a good idea.

If your dog has a lot of separation anxiety, a game based entirely around hiding from them can be challenging. Similarly, if they're clingy about their toys, taking one away to hide it can feel like a violation to them. It ends up being more stressful than fun.

Some dogs might not have the attention span or interest in the game. I've seen dogs that give up really quickly and just assume you went to work, and go settle on their bed or start chewing on their bone, oblivious to you waiting for them. It's just not an attractive game for them.

Sometimes, depending on where you hide yourself or an object, your dog might be destructive trying to get to it. Tearing through rather than going under a blanket, scratching at a door instead of going around, these kinds of things can damage your home.

It's always worth making sure the game is actually fun for your dog before you invest too much into training it. Fortunately, scent work is a good option for the same kind of game, and the basic training of sit and stay is still valuable.

Should you get special toys for seeking?

You can if you want, but you don't need to. I think having a set of seeker toys is good, especially if you want to get into scent work, but just for casual play, you don't need them. As long as your dog can recognize the names of specific objects and knows how to find them, they can work just fine.

One thing I like to do is add in a secondary kind of training to hide and seek, which is cleanup. Instead of having your dog bring the toy to you, have them put it in their toy box and reward them when they do. This way, you teach them to pick up their toys when you ask them to.

Can you train a dog to hide for you?

Sometimes, yes! Traditionally, hide and seek works both ways, but it can be harder to train a dog to go hide somewhere than it is to have them find you. I've seen it happen, but it's more coincidental.

Personally, I'm not entirely sure I would encourage it, though. You do run the risk of teaching your dog to hide from you, and if they end up getting loose somehow, that can make it harder to find them later. If you do this, make absolutely sure you have an ironclad "come" command trained into them.

So, there you have it! Hide and seek can be a really fun game to play, whether you're doing the hiding or you're hiding toys or scents from your pup. Have you ever trained a dog to play hide and seek? How did it go, and did you teach them any variations? As always, I love hearing your stories, so leave them in the comments or shoot me a message on social media.