Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and today we’re going to talk about training dogs. So, let’s talk about how to teach your Rottweiler to pay attention. Rottweilers are wonderful dogs. They’re German dogs, and they have been used in Germany in the past to pickup meat for the butcher. They’re considered working dog, so they also hunted wild bores in Germany, and they’re often used for cattle herding believe it or not. You can definitely see the herding dog commanding them when you see them playing with other dogs; they like to grab their back legs. As working dogs, they are prone to work closely with people, but we have to teach our Rottweiler to pay attention. Rottweilers have a reputation as being very tough and gruff—and yes, they’re used as guard dogs—but for the most part they are very sweet dogs. This is Ursa, and as you can see, she was a sweet baby oh! Yes she is. So let’s teach her to pay attention. We’re going say her name and then mark when she makes eye contact. Now, as you can see she’s a little distracted by things in the environment. Now, if you haven’t yet looked at the pre-training videos, please do so before you proceed training your Rottweiler to pay attention to you. Oh! She heard the treat bag. As you can see, Ursa is pretty treat motivated, so I need to hide my treat bag, so she doesn’t know where it is. So, I’m going to wait until she’s distracted. Ursa, good. Now, I know it’s hard to see on camera, but I’m marking exactly when she makes eye contact. Ursa, good. Remember sometimes this takes a little time and you have to be patient. Ursa, good. Now see, she keeps looking at the hand that she thinks that treat is in, but she’s picking up on knowing… she needs to make some eye contact. Ursa, good. Now there I had to help her a little bit. She flicked her eyes to me, but it wasn’t really an acknowledgment. I want some sustained eye contact for at least a half of second. It’s a polite deference, a request and it’s an indication that she’s really checking in with me about the appropriateness of her behavior. Now, remember I want to start making this reinforcement random, so she never knows whether the treat is coming or not, and that’ll make the behavior more likely to recur. So, next we’re going to talk about how to teach her to sit.
