The Number One Behavior I Teach as a Dog Trainer

You can teach your dog a lot of valuable behaviors - sit, down, stay, come, for example. All of these are important for dog owners. But none of them are the first thing I work on with the dogs I train. The number one behavior I ask of the dog? Engagement. 

Engagement means your dog is not only willing to work with you, but wants to work with you and chooses to work with you in a variety of environments. The distinction between a dog doing something because you want them to versus because they want to is HUGE (a concept that is paramount in agility, and why I think more people and dogs will benefit from getting into dog sports). Just think about how you feel when you do something because someone told you to, versus when you do something because you want to. You can feel the difference in your emotions and motivation, right? Without engagement, you’re going to feel like you’re pulling teeth trying to get your dog to listen to you.

So, how do I build engagement? That depends on the dog, but the first step as a dog owner is to identify what your dog likes. I find that it’s easiest to work with food and toys as rewards, so that’s where I like to start. It’s very common for dog owners  to tell me their dog is food motivated or plays with toys but “only inside” or “only when there isn’t anything else going on”, meaning that they find other things in the environment more reinforcing than food. Good news, you can change that!

For food motivated dogs, I like to teach a “find it” cue which means look for food on the ground. I start inside with low distractions, and then work up to trying this outside with minimal distractions. If you find yourself in a situation where you tell your dog “find it”, toss food on the ground, and they ignore the food - congratulations! You are receiving important feedback. Your dog is too distracted and cannot pay attention to the food on the ground. In this case, I wait a bit, and see if at some point they decide to come back to the food. How many distractions there are will affect whether your dog will be successful in disengaging with the distraction and re-engaging with the food. You might also need to use higher value food as a reward (think pieces of chicken, cheese, or hot dog). 

“But Kirsten, how is that engagement if my dog isn’t looking at me?

Your dog has likely practiced disengaging with you for a long time, so we need to start small and allow your dog to be successful. It’s asking too much for them to disengage from a distraction and give you all of their attention (while they are still thinking about that distraction over there).

What “find it” allows them to do is make a choice - keep looking at and focusing on the distraction, or eat food off the ground. It’s a low stakes high reward situation. I’m allowing the dog to make a choice - would you like to keep focusing on that thing over there, or would you like to eat this food that happens to be on the ground? Eating food off the ground also allows the dog’s body to calm down so that they become less aroused, can think more clearly, and process more information. 

The bottom line? If your dog isn’t listening to you, ask yourself why. It’s not because your dog is stubborn. It’s because for whatever reason, they actually cannot listen to you in that moment. And it’s our job to help them work through that - working with, not against, the dog.