반려견의 집중력을 향상시키는 프로 반려견 훈련 팁 #35

your dog and then your teacher wants to give you some feedback. So, you take all that focus and good energy that you just had on your dog and you go wah wah wah wah wah wah. And she goes wah wah wah wah. And then you go wah wah wah wah wah. And then she goes wah wah wah wah. And you go wah wah. And then you look back at your dog and go, okay, let's train again. And the dog's going, yeah, I left you about two wah wah böyle böyle You can't just expect the dog to be on when you want them to be on. And then when you turn your back on them and leave them hanging, expect them to pick right up. They're not machines, guys. They're animals. They're like you at the party when you were left in the dust by somebody who's talking to somebody more important. Now your dog doesn't know what's going on. All your dog knows is you are on a roll. You are doing something good. And then you disengaged. You saw somebody better come into the room. So, how can we fix that? How can we fix these inadvertent timeouts? And it doesn't matter. You might be saying, oh, well, I don't really go to class. This isn't about me. Don't hit pause or flick away. Because I have seen so many people lately walk down the street with their dog on leash and they are scrolling through their phone. Hello, your dog. Like just, I'm not saying when you walk your dog, you have to have like your eyes on them and constantly, but you know what? Get your head up, get your nose out of your phone, enjoy the nature around you. Be grateful for what's going on. Talk to your dog from down to time. You know, he might not want you to babble at them the whole time because he's got P-mail to read right on this route. But be present for the dog. Because when you're not, you are giving them that timeout. You are saying this little box that I'm carrying in my hand needs me more than you do. I see it a lot in the sport of dog agility. So, somebody might turn the wrong way and the dog doesn't read that and the dog goes off and then they give them the big sigh. That big sigh is saying, I am so disappointed in you. And you know what? We're human. When we're training our dogs, there may be times that we get frustrated and we get disappointed. And I'd be willing to bet the disappointment really isn't about the dog. It's about you're disappointed that you didn't do better or you didn't make the right choices or didn't have the right training plan. But what that dog here is, is this big sigh and your energy change? You can't let the dog know. So, what I do, for example, I was training some

puppies today. Puppies are going to be seven weeks old. And sometimes when you get them this young, you don't, I mean, somebody at my level doesn't even know the exact right thing to do all the time. And I'll see that a puppy has lost confidence. And to me, that's like a dagger going through my heart. My job is to raise your confidence, never to lose it. And so, my abandoned mission is I just drop what I'm doing and I put my face on the floor because I know puppies love to jump on me and pull my hair and bite my glasses. And let's make all things right in the world. It doesn't matter that I'm not going to have success with what I'm training. Right now, let's just get back on track. Now, that change of tack might be, I'm just going to throw a handful of cookies in the crate, put you in the crate and regroup. That might be what happens instead of the big sigh. So, don't turn your back on your dog to talk to an instructor. Don't scroll through your iPhone when you're walking down the street. But also if you're walking down the street with your dog and you're having a great old time, you're saying, Hey buddy. Yeah. You got some good smells there. And then you see your neighbor. Hey, did you see Netflix last night? I was watching. Yeah. I was watching that. Again, pick up with your neighbor. You're disconnecting with your dog. How fair is that? Like I've been to agility trials and I'd be walking in with a puppy and people will go, Susan, oh, is that your new puppy? Yeah. I'll just keep walking and, you know, pretending I'm a little bit deaf because I'd rather, this is a little secret. Cat's out of the bag right here on my podcast. I'd rather be a little bit disrespectful to a person than I would to my puppy. Not that I want to disrespect anybody or be rude to anybody. But if I have my puppy out, they have a hundred percent of my attention. Now, if there was somebody that said, Hey Susan, and they directly wanted to talk to me, no problem. I would pick the puppy up, maybe give them a little tug toy to play with. Well, I said, Hey, I'd love to catch up with you, but I'm training my puppy right now. Can I catch up with you later? And then boom, before I give them a chance to answer. Most people are saying, sure, Susan, I forgot, you know, sorry. And I'll just get right back and play with my puppy. All right. So, I want that focused attention from my dog that I spoke about at the beginning of this podcast. To get that focused attention from your dog in work, you give that focused attention to your dog.

When you go back and write your records of that little session, you write down how you did with respect to keeping your focus and attention on your dog. And if you have to talk to an instructor, wah, wah, all that you're going to do is either, it could be as simple as take the dog's collar and give them little scratches behind the ear or pat them while you're, so you, your hands can be doing this thing while your brain is listening to this, not this thing, this instructor. Or you might ask the dog to lie down. Other dogs should be able to lie down for a minute or two while you talk to somebody else. Just say, lie down, maybe give them a cookie and talk to the instructor. I've seen people just continuously feed the dog. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, but giving them a cookie if they're in the down position or a sit position, or you could tug with the dog. Now that might be a long tug, but do something intentional with that dog before you disengage from the dog to talk to that instructor. So, the dog knows they're not getting a timeout. I've seen this when people have a great run in agility and they turn and they go across the finish line and they start celebrating with their friends. Yeah, I did it, I did it, I did it. And the dog's going, excuse me, you did it? Was, was I not in the ring with you right now? And why aren't we celebrating together? If you're running agility, no matter it was a good run or a bad run, you need to celebrate with your dog first and foremost. Not be disappointed, celebrate so that my goal is that the dog doesn't know what kind of run we had when we leave that ring. Because in the ring is just an evaluation. It's not like you're curing, you know, cancer or, or solving world peace. It's an evaluation of what you've taught your dog. And if it doesn't go well, you celebrate and go back to the drawing board. Do not give that dog an inadvertent timeout, a punishment because you're disappointed. All right. My mentor Bob Bailey, he says, and I've said this before, one of the big reasons why training fails is because people expect way too much of their dog and way too little of themselves. You need to be focused when you're training your dog. And it's not just the 10 minutes you might train during the day. It's the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day. I'm not saying you have to give your dog a zeroed in attention all that time. I'm saying that you need to be intentional about what that dog is doing or where you're going to be in your role in that dog. So, here's another

inadvertent timeout I see all the time. I'll be teaching a workshop and I'll say, okay guys, we're going to do this, this, and this. Now go get your dogs. And they run and they open the crate door and they put the leash on and then they go out to do and they go, oh crap, I forgot my toy. And then they go back and then they grab their toy and then they're on the way out. Oh, I don't have his favorite cookies. So, then they go back and they grab the favorite cookies. Have you ever, have you ever done that? All right. So, here is your dog's point of view. You open the crate door and he's like, yeah, we're going to do something. So, right now you and your dog are behaving just like I would with my dog. You've got that ninja sauce of attention from your dog. You release your dog and he's like, yeah, what are we going to do? And you go, I forgot something. And your dog's going, huh? And then you're running back and you're getting this and you're doing that and you're doing this and you're finding you, you're getting all your stuff. And you know, a minute and a half later, you're ready for your dog and your dog was up here. And now your dog's gone all the way down here and they're sniffing the floor. That's how you lose it. That's how you lose it. That's how elite trainers can get that kind of focus and desire from their dog. It's possible with anybody with any dog, but it starts with you giving the respect and attention that you expect to get back from your dog. It's not going to happen overnight. You might start with just getting them in and out of the crate. Crate games is a brilliant place to start off every session with an explosion of joy from your dog and you grow from there. You might only do a 10-second training session and build up to a minute training session. You know, you see dogs who are less motivated. They tend to get a lot of timeouts because their person doesn't know how to deal with the lack of motivation. They do things like putting them in front of people or at a competition or around a lot of other dogs when they don't have that confidence to be there. And then the dog gets more withdrawn and then the person gets very disappointed in size and that's a timeout. The other end of the spectrum, those high drive dogs, man, oh man, do they suffer for timeouts. Because what happens, they move so fast that a lot of times the trainers are challenged to capture the correct behavior. So, they either miss the chance to reward or they reward the wrong things because behaviors happen so fast.

And then what happens is they think the dog is wrong. So, they either they're disappointed or they give the dog a timeout. That's the mistake I made with my high drive dog, Buzzy, the book Shaping Success I wrote about Buzz. And I learned some massively important lessons from Buzz. Dogs like Buzz who are high drive. The more mistakes they make, the more timeouts, whether they're inadvertent or intentional, the higher they get, the more frantic they get, the more mistakes they make, the more frustrated you are because you feel like you're incompetent because you can't train this dog and you guys are vortexing and spiraling. And it's not fun. It's not fun for anybody. High drive dogs, they need you to accept them as they are. They need you to not try to make them Zen. You need to understand they can still be successful. They can still work well with you. Just you, one of the team needs to be focused and grounded. Take a deep breath, be intentional, short sessions, have some success, put that dog away and celebrate. All right. The high drive dogs, you think they can take it. Look how tough and driven he is. Inside, they can't take it. They're trying so desperately hard to do what's right. And they get more and more frantic because they seem to fail and get another timeout. So, those high drive dogs, they need special grace from you. And in any partnership in dog training, one pair of the team is going to be a little higher than the other. Now, if you've got a dog who needs motivation, you're going to come in like, Hey, how you doing today? You know what we got for you? We're going to do some fitness. Are you ready? You get a nut kick and you come back out here and you get in that kennel and you come and let's get that dog toy. If you've got a dog that's down here, you're going to come in with all the energy. Now, if you've got a dog who's up here, you're going to come in being the Zen master. All right. So, meditate before you come in. Come in and be calm no matter how much that dog's bouncing around. You be the calm one because that's where you bring yourselves to a place of balance where this energy here is met with this calm and intentional thoughtful training here. And that balances each other out. And that's when you get beautiful, exciting dog training happening. Think about after every training session, or maybe at the end of the day, your interactions with your dog. Did you give that dog inadvertent timeouts? Is your dog showing more and more focus when they're training with you because you're not giving them those inadvertent timeouts? If you start writing

things down, you become aware of what you're doing. And any timeout you give your dog will be because you are experimenting with, I think you know how to do this. I'm going to let you know that was inappropriate. And I'm going to come back and let you show me how brilliant you can be. That's an intentional timeout. They're the only ones that should happen. Remember those don't happen that often either. That's it for me with another episode of Shaped by Dog. I hope you think about this one because it could make all the difference in the world and you could have that ninja level of relationship with your dog the way the rest of us do when we're training our elite dogs. We'll see you next time.