큐(cues)를 추가하려고 할 때 강아지가 몰입(engagement)에 어려움을 겪어요

saying that Cindy and I love. And it goes like this. Don't name it. In other words, don't put it on cue. Don't name it until you love it. Don't name it. And that's so, so true. So I think that at this point in time, a dog that's only 90% on having the behavior right isn't ready to have a behavior put on cue. The problem with, and I remember this from going to Ann's seminars, and she always talked about one of her dogs that turned out to be just a great, great dog in agility work. And she was training it in the incline wall where it has to go up and come over it. And when it comes down the backside, it has to stop. And when that dog was coming over the wall one time, she gave the cue, the first time she put a cue in, and at the wrong spot. And for the life of that dog, one time, now she trains with border collies and they're very intelligent. For one time of doing that, and that dog would go to the top of the, of the incline wall, and it would sit there. Because it thought that's what it was supposed to do. Because, Ann said, she didn't wait until the dog fully understood everything that it had to do. She gave the cue too soon. And Michael Ellis, a friend of ours that we do a lot of videos with, I like the way that he explains marker training, or if you want, putting a dog on cue. And that is, when we mark a behavior, when we put a cue on a behavior, it's like a dog takes a photograph of exactly what it was doing at that point in time. They don't understand words. They listen to us talk all the time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, that's just the way it is. They don't know what it is. But when they do, when we put something on cue that has a reward that goes with it, a lot of them take a photo of exactly what they were doing. And that's what they'll do in the future to get that reward that they want. And so you have to be careful there. So, we go on here. I'm going to say what Cindy said. Without seeing your dog, I can only make a generalized guess about what's going on. But in my experience, raising lots of puppies and using this system, I have a couple of suggestions. One is that your dog is hitting the age where they start to become more mature and more hormonal. And we talk about this again and again and again. This age of seven months, eight months, up to 14 months on a lot of dogs is puberty for those dogs. And their heads go crazy, like kids' heads go crazy when they go through puberty. You know, dogs do the same thing. So it could be something to do with that, too.

Cindy says, they notice smells and other things more and generally start behaving a bit like a teenager in many, many cases. My puppy is eight months old. This is Cindy talking now when she wrote this. My puppy's eight months old and I'm going through it right now. The other thing is, it sounds like he may be bored. Are you still working engagement and getting him primed and ready for your training session? And by that, in our Power of Training Dogs with Food DVD, we talk about how to tell your dog that we are going to go into a training session. And one of the markers is ready or are you ready? When you take your dog out for training, are you ready? Are you ready? Get him hyped up. Are you ready? And then when we're done, we tell them all done and we put all of our training stuff away. It's nice when you can tell a dog, okay, we're going to start a training session. Okay, we're all done. Training's over now. You can go do what you want to do. That will carry on in life as the dog gets older and listens to all done a thousand different times. It's going to understand that. And when you're doing something and your dog's pestering you, you know, when it's two or three, at least mine is when they come and I'm watching TV and watching the Packers beat everybody and I don't want to fool with them. I just say all done. Then they walk away. That's just me. So Cindy goes ahead and says, also at seven months, I see many of my students forget that engagement is still and always will be a huge part of every training session. So even though you're only working on one behavior at a time, if you go out and make the dog do five, 10, 15 times reps on one behavior, they're going to get bored. They're absolutely going to get bored. You're better off going out and doing it, getting the dog engaged with you and during the engagement, ask for a behavior. If you're at the point where you're 100% sure you love the behavior, you ask for it, mark the behavior and go on with more engagement. Something else to keep in mind is that when you're doing this and you put the dog on cue, if you're doing it at the right time, don't just give them one food reward. Give them three, four, five, six food rewards. Give them four food rewards. Give them one food reward. Give them three food rewards. Vary it up all the time. Variable reinforcement is going to build on engagement and it's going to build on focus that your dog has with you. It's going to make games more fun. Like Michael Ellis says, turn your reward into an event.

A lot of times you give the dog one reward, they get the reward. Okay, what else? It looks pretty interesting over there. But if he doesn't know how many rewards he's going to get, okay, give me another one. I'm ready. I'm ready. What are we going to do here? It works. Trust me, it works. So Cindy basically goes on and says, you can still only work on one behavior per session, but put some effort into the engagement before, during, and after you work on the behaviors, which is basically what we just said. So Cindy has a good point here. She says, experiment with your dog doing engagement with food. Then ask for a behavior, for example, the down. And then more engagement after that. And then maybe work on touch pads or work on restrained recalls, something that's different than the positions that you just asked for. Break it up, make it interesting. And then the customer wrote back and said, thanks very much for your reply. I plan on doing IPO work with him. I just joined a regional Schutz and Club and I've been learning a lot. This will be my first working dog. So I'm nervous and excited. It's amazing. All the different challenges that you face in training a sport dog. I never would have imagined. I think you have some of the greatest ideas and I definitely think the touch pad and the restrained recalls are a great idea. He does really great and loves both of those exercises. I also agree that I'm probably boring him and taking too long or too much time in my training sessions. That's a good point. Keep your training sessions short. People say, I'm going to take my dog out and train him for 15 or 20 minutes twice a day, once a day. That's too long. You're 10 times better off to take your dog out, have a training session for a minute or two and do that three or four times in a day and then put them away. Even whines and barks in frustration if I don't start soon enough. But when I start doing the same behavior over and over and over and putting it on cue, he changes his demeanor, which basically we've confirmed for all the things that we're talking about. So thanks again. We really appreciate it. So if you have a question on dog training or breeding or health issues, if we can help you, we will offer some advice on where you can get more information. And if we can't help you, we're going to tell you. I mean, there are some questions that we get that cannot be answered through emails. A lot of them on dog aggression, but that's not, and maybe some on medical issues too. But we're going to tell you if we can't. I want to talk a little bit about the Ask Cindy portal on the front

page of Learburg.com. You can go to that portal and ask Cindy, my wife, any question you want on dog training, on dog breeding, on health issues with your dog. Cindy and I have been in the dog business for many, many years. Me, I'm 75 and I was training dogs pretty seriously for 60 years. Cindy has been training dogs seriously for 40, 45 years. She was a groomer for 20 years, worked in a vet for 20 years. If we can answer a question for you, she answers the questions every day. People can come in and post, and you don't have to be a customer of Learburg. You do have to put your email in there. And the purpose for that, and I have to tell you this, is not so we can spam you with our email or sell your email address. We'd never, ever do that. The purpose for getting the email or the ticket with your email on it is that you can ask a question. Cindy will answer it. If she needs more information, she'll come back at you and she has to be able to communicate with you. And if you come back a week later, a year later, six months later, and ask a question, Cindy will look your email address up to see what you have asked in the past. And if it's on the same dog, she can review her previous answers and advice, and maybe expand on it. So that's why. But it's, I don't know any other website on the internet for dog training, where anybody can go in and ask any question they want, and get it, get an answer right away. If we're home, Cindy gets up in the morning, she goes out at five o'clock, takes care of our horses, and comes back in and answers her Q&As that she's got for the morning. What I do is I pick the good ones and put them into videos like this. We have a lot of them. I just started putting them into videos after doing the Ask Cindy for many, many years. We've got like 3,700 of them in a database that's searchable, that you can go and put quotation marks around what you want to search on, and be more, you'll get a more specific answer. We don't put every question in our database. It would be, there's thousands that don't go in there. We try and pick the best ones and put them in there. So there's 3,700 good ones there. So if you have a question, go to the Ask Cindy portal. If you want the best dog training equipment, I think, that you can find anywhere, we have it. We don't sell junk. We don't sell cheap stuff just because it's cheap. We only sell things that Cindy and I would use. And a number of the things that we sell, we have people that make them for us. We have a whole family of

Amish harness makers that all they do is our leather work, and they've done it now for over 25 years. And if you like the content in these Q&As, we have over 1,500 free videos on our website, in addition to a number of online courses and streaming videos that we sell by some of the top trainers really in the United States and really in the world. What's up here? What's up here? Thank you.