Many of you have been asking me how to train your Corgi to do the "Wave". First of all, we never trained Buttercup. He totally taught himself when he was younger. When we adopted him, he started doing it the first evening when I was chopping up vegetables for dinner. Every time I gave him a carrot, he would do it again.

We noticed that he would do it to get attention, as when my husband and I were talking and he felt left out of the conversation. It progressed to his improptu wave for his new love, Tweety (see the video of this, if interested). This was not prompted at all and was a total surprise to me.

The next surprise was when I was singing him the "Butter, Butter" song and he spontaneously jumped up and started waving in time to the song (see the video of this, if interested).

He knows that we love it because we just praise him and praise him when he does it. It was getting to the point that he was doing it a lot and we were concerned about strain on his spine (not sure if this is a valid concern or not).

Buttercup is a Cardigan and in his case has a very large bone structure and is quite muscular. When he does the "wave" he sticks his tail directly behind him on the floor. This probably serves to help balance him. This could be a key ingredient. There are times when he is very balanced and could stay in this position for long periods of time but we don't let him. As he does have a long tail possibly this poses a challenge for the Pembrokes who want to learn it.

My only advice after watching him many times is that he has to be firmly in the sitting pose before he starts to rise. If you watch the videos carefully, you can probably see this. His weight is firmly on his back haunches. Once he is up, if he stops waving his "hands", I bend in front of him (but not too close so that I don't offset his centre of gravity) and squat and say "do the wave" and I wave my hands like he does. This will usually start the waving again.

Although we love to see it, we definitely don't want to take advantage of his adorability factor so often will just give him vegetables when I am cooking before he gets a chance to wave. After all, he is 9 years old and should have some breaks.

I don't know if this is any help. I am certainly not a dog trainer. I have never seen another dog do this. My husband had a dog once who did this and it was the same thing, the dog taught herself. So good luck and let me know if anyone figures out how to train for this.