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Teaching a Dog to Attend to You and Ignore Other Dogs
One of my clients has a darling cavapoo named Puffin who gets wildly excited when she sees other dogs while out on walks. Teaching a dog to be attentive to her person is the foundation for all other training. Thankfully, dogs already watch us quite a bit throughout the day, so it’s usually easy to get the beginning steps of this training started.
Puffin was first introduced to this skill inside, without distractions. Her mom found lots of opportunities to capture natural occurrences of eye contact from Puffin, and would treat her regularly for this. Then she began using Puffin’s name to get her attention, and treated her for this, too. She practiced in various rooms around the house, and then gradually started to look for moments when Puffin was mildly distracted to practice the skill, and she did very well.
What else would Puffin need to work on?
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4 Replies
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Great topic! She may want to move outside to her yard next, and practice while new distractions are present (birds etc)
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Absolutely, Sandy! Puffin’s mom lives in a condo with direct access to a grassy area in the back of her unit. A good place to start before getting to areas with more people and dogs. ????
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One thing I always love to do, is having the pup make eye contact with you before they are allowed to other side of the door. Access to outdoors = eye contact ????
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I love that, Trinity!
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