How to Get Your Dog's Attention

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Nancy Cusick and I'm a professional dog trainer in Austin, Texas. You can visit my website at trainmydogs.com. This is Sesame and today we are going to show you how to get your dog's attention. There are several different ways to get your dog's attention. One thing is you really want to make sure that they know their name. so when you get a new dog you can load it. So each time I call you Becky and I hand you 20 bucks I bet you'd start to respond to it pretty quickly. So with our dogs we're going to use food because to them that's pretty valuable. You can use your treats which is what I have here today or you can use their dog food. Basically all I'm going to do is say Sesame and hand her a reward. I could walk around my house and do this. I could have her running around and call her name, Sesame. Just make sure you load her name. Try not to use your dog's name in a reprimand. Sesame, good job. So that is how you get our dog's attention using their name. Another great thing is to load what I call a non-emotional sound like your whistle, clapping, kiss noise. Those are non-emotional. I can't whistle very well so I'm going to use this as my sound and reward her. Each time I do it I'm going to hand her a treat. We are going to wait for her to look away from me so that you can see that it is starting to get loaded. Sesame. We can also load other sounds like kiss noises. Good girl. That way if I am walking with my dog on their leash and I see a squirrel up ahead and I need to get their attention so they don't see it, kiss noises are great for that one. If my dog is at a distance and I need to get their attention, this would work really well. If we're at the house and I just want her to come over by me, Sesame, we can use her name. Another game that you can play for attention is getting eye contact. One of my favorite ways is to clicker train eye contact. When you hear this click go off it is like taking the dog's picture. So I'm going to hold my food out, both arms and when Sesame finally decides to look up at me I'm going to mark her behavior and hand her a treat. Eye contact can be really quick so the clicker works great. The clicker is just like using the word yes. Good girl. Good girl. She has very quickly looked at me a couple times but I missed it and if you miss it it is just too late. Good girl. O'kay so we could keep playing that game and once Sesame got it she would start staring at me. Sesame, good job. So load your dog's name, load some different sounds kiss noises, clapping, whistling, whistling is probably the best and work on some eye contact. It is a great way to get your dog's attention."