Easily Distracted by Dogs T-Shirt

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You need to create situations where you control how many other dogs there are, and what they do next, and where you control what kind of access to those dogs your dog has.

The more likely explanation for your dog’s disobedience is that they’re overwhelmed by the environment and simply can’t focus. There are too many interesting things to explore, and dogs need to sniff them all. It’s often not deliberate defiance. You just might not have taught your dog to tune out distractions and concentrate on you. Build Distractions Slowly Start slow. Ask your dog to stay for two seconds instead of 2 minutes in a new situation. Always set your dog up for success or you’ll create a confused dog. You can adapt this for your own use of course, but the main thing is to have a system and not just to guess wildly whether or not your dog is making progress. Impulse control is the ability to resist urges and impulses. If you’ve ever watched a dog doing agility and wondered how on earth they’re able to concentrate and run through all those obstacles while there’s a bunch of barking dogs on the sidelines it’s because they have excellent impulse control.When it’s time to train your dog do you find yourself competing for his attention? Does your dog get easily distracted by other dogs or people? Does he go off and follow his nose rather than listen to you? Is he get overly excited by any noise or movement? Imagine yourself at the dog park with Fido on a nice summer day. When you open that gate I bet your dog is interested in everything but you.

Find something your dog can do, in a way that he can manage today, and work on introducing more complexity or distraction in the future.How did you increase your dogs focus and impulse control? Did you work on that before other behaviors? Did I leave out any great techniques? I’d love to hear what methods worked well for you – share your tips and suggestions in the comments. Recommended Reading: Of course, if I’m using the “follow the target” behavior to elicit a heeling response around distractions, I’ll need to have already conditioned for a reliable “follow the target” response for the necessary distance and environmental components. Play your way past distractions Shrinking the stimulus by manipulating distance brings a highly effective behavior modification technique, desensitization, to your distraction training plan. Desensitization means that you are 1) exposing the dog to a stimulus (a distraction, in this case) at a level that does not evoke the undesired response (ignoring your cue, in this case), and 2) gradually increasing the intensity of the stimulus as the dog grows comfortable at each successive level of exposure. If your dog cannot respond reliably to a cue 5 feet away from a sidewalk where someone is jogging, he may be able to respond 50 feet away from the sidewalk. Start where he is successful and move closer to the distraction incrementally once the dog is successful 80% of the time at the current exposure level. Increase your speed

If you want your dog to come when you call him even when other dogs are within sight or sound of him, you’ll need to train specifically for this skill When a pet parent says, “My dog does not listen at the park,” this means more practice at the park. How to Train Your Dog Shorter durations tasks enable you to reward the dog more frequently which also helps to keep him motivated to work with you.Instead of avoiding environments that your dog is distracted by, you want to bring your dog around those exact environments to teach your dog to focus on you! Learn to make focusing on you fun for your dog. That way, it doesn’t become about the treats toys, but instead that your dog enjoys focusing on you because you’re Fun! Pretty soon, your dog will begin to understand that the only time he gets his favorite treat is in a given context. (after they give you their attention first, of course) 7. Use Distractions To Teach Your Dog To Focus If you’re raising a puppy or teenage dog you already know how challenging it can be. Puppies aren’t exactly known for their amazing attention spans. And when they hit adolescence it’s like they suddenly wake up one day and forgot everything — they stop listening to us and start acting on their own impulses.

People worry terribly that they are ‘cheating’, or making it too easy for the dog, or that they will be forever dependent on the props and protocols they use in training. You cannot expect a dog that has learned to recall in an empty field, to continue to do so when a dog walker appears in the distance. He might, and he might not. Teaching your dog a new behavior is the easy part! The tough part is practicing your new behavior around many distractions. 🙂 Paying attention to you whether or not they physically see a reward leads to the possibility of getting rewarded. If you often find yourself wondering whether or not your dog is ready for a more challenging exercise, international dog trainer Jean Donaldson has a great way of helping you decide when to make things harder for your dog, in a systematic way.He has been specifically trained to recall reliably away from other dogs, which is not always an easy thing to achieve. We’ll look at that in a moment. The disobedient dog – an example When you get in the habit of waving a piece of treat in your dogs, face you may get them to listen to you, but only when you show them you have “something for them”