Teaching: Hold it ~ Drop it, in a bowl/box

Since we're moving, I thought it would be fun to teach Toby to "help" us pack by getting him to pick random stuff up and put them in a box. Toby has a FB page so I thought this would be especially fun for his followers to watch too and would make up for the lack of posts we're doing right now.

How did you teach your dog/s to put things in boxes or bowls??
I watched a kikopup video about it, and it seems simple enough in principle, but Toby just looks SO BORED doing this trick so I wondered if there was a way to teach it that made it more exciting?

He'll 'hold it' but he won't move from his position with the object in his mouth, and as soon as he hears the clicker for holding it, he drops the object because he's just not interested in the trick any more. He'll also only hold a plastic wrench that we have and I'd like to get him putting maybe books or CD cases in a box among other items.

Does he have a formal retrieve? I have started teaching Tucker to put his toys in his toy box and after two sessions it's gone super well. He already knows how to retrieve objects I point to and bring them to me so I just wanted to adjust that to bringing them to the toy box instead of to me. So first I taught him to stick his head in the empty box when I pointed to it. I just shaped that. Then I put the toy box in front of me, cued him to retrieve a toy, and as he got near I pointed to the box and rewarded any sort of attention he gave to the box (looking down at it, lowering of the head at all) to indicate he sort of kind of wanted to follow the stick your head in the box behavior. Once I click he drops the toy for the treat. Then I do it again. After a few of those he was coming up to the box in the right position and lowering his head over the box so I cued him to drop it before clicking. After a bit of that I waited for him to drop it without a drop it cue. So he very quickly was able to figure out how to pick up the object, bring it to the box, lower his head, and drop the object. We have started working on moving the box further away from me and it's still going well.


So I'd start with teaching some sort of retrieve first. It doesn't need to be perfect before you introduce the box, but you want him able to pick up random objects and walk with them in his mouth.

That's a good approach. He "fetches" but there's never been a formal retrieve. I'll start working on that, thanks for the suggestion!!