Train Your Dog to Focus on You By Jeff Nenadic At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Having your dog focus on you is imperative for proper and successful training; for it implies obedience and concentration. It ensures that it is following every action and word of yours and shall learn faster and better. Despite the fact that every dog has a name, calling out their names is hardly effective as people use them only when the dog is out of ear shot or is doing something wrong. Thus, the dogs often associate their names screamed out with danger or something is amiss instead of a simple request for your attention call.

Hence to ensure that your dog responds to its name, it needs focus training. It needs to respond irrespective of the happenings around it, and be attentive to what you are doing or saying. The steps for the same are as follows:

1) Remember to train your dog when you have been out of its contact for some hours, as it is in a better position to obey like in the morning as you both have been away from each other the whole night. Dogs like contact and need space like humans. Too much attention and being aloof; are both not good. Dogs love to give and get attention after long spells of no contact. Be patient while training and have your dog on the leash to control it better. Take him regularly for walks for relieving purposes.

2) Rewards are an important part of the training session. Reward the dog just as you would congratulate a child on its good behavior or when it has learnt its lesson well. Edible rewards are more attractive to them as food/snacks motivate them to do well. It is easier to motivate a hungry dog while training, hence try not to feed your dog before training.

3) The dog needs to look into the face and having food in the mouth is motivating for it would like to have a morsel of what you are eating. Hence, to gain its attention, you can spit food particles. You can get closer to him by kneeling down, for it to see what is in from your mouth (maybe piece of meat). The food should be something the dog likes, for only then it will respond. If you are careful, you may let it take food directly from your mouth without getting hurt. You can also hold the food close to your mouth and let it eat while you command it and maintain eye contact also.

4) Using simple commands like focus, look or ready consistently and regularly helps the dog understand their meaning. Use the command after calling its name, or a clicking sound with tongue to help him to focus on you directly.
Practice is required. Focus time needs to be increased steadily with distraction with shorter focus time with high distractions in the beginning to build up the dogs attention and obedience. This needs to continue until the dog can focus without being easily distracted.

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