How to Make Your Dog Pay Attention

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and today we are going to talk about training dogs. We are going to talk about how to get your dog to pay attention to you. If you have not already, please take a look at the videos about relationship, giving commands, and some of the other pre-training videos before you get to this point. This is Shira. Shira is a very good dog, but when she gets distracted it is hard for her to pay attention to her owner. So what I want to do before I teach any other commands is to teach her to check in with me. Now anytime, good, your dogs makes eye contact and checks in with you, particularly if it is about the appropriateness of their behavior or for your approval, mark it with your marker word or sound and give random reinforcement, but we actually also want to teach our dogs to pay attention to us on command. You can use a word like watch or you can just use their name. Now there are couple of different ways to do this. If you have a dog who is terribly distracted and does not want to pay attention to you, you can try to use food as a lure try to get her to look away from you first, move it your eyes, say their name, Shira good, and then give them the treat. Now there she made eye contact before I could even finish saying her name. Ideally you say the name and then mark at the second they look at you. Now we will try to get Shira to look away here. Shira, good. Now that is excellent, she is looking right at me very very quickly. Let us try that again, Shira good. Now it took a little bit longer that time because she thought I had the treat in my left hand and she checked in there first, but I do not mark it until I actually get her to look at me. See how she whipping her head around, that is what we want to see. Now with a dog like Shira, who is very attentive to whoever she is with, she is going to look at you a lot anyway, remember to mark that too; checking in, and marking the name. "