When a professional dog trainer is discussing focus, he is in fact discussing ‘engaging’ WITH your dog. What does the term “engage” mean? It means that you are physically interacting with your pup in a manner that keeps the dog’s attention on you.
Why is focus so important? Why does a dog “react” to its surroundings? When a dog sees a squirl and chases after it, it is satisfying its “prey drive”, it is ‘reacting’ to its instinct. When a dog starts barking at another dog, it is satisfying its pack drive, the need to interact with that other dog and be social (whether for good or bad). When a dog sees a scrap of food on the ground and pulls towards it, it is satisfying its food drive. To overcome these drives and have complete focus from our furry friend, we need to be something more interesting than all of the above-mentioned distractions.
When a dog ‘engages’ with you, you are providing all of the stimulation that it derives from the above the mentioned scenarios, hence keeping its focus.
Someone might ask if training with your dog or working with your dog is engaging them? Well, yes and no. While you are training with your dog, is he/she completely engrossed with you? Do you have your pups’ undivided attention? If the answer is ‘no’, or ‘mostly’, or only ‘sometimes’ then “working” with your dog is not truly having him/her engage WITH you.
Is loving on your dog ‘engaging’ them? Well, yes and no, again. If after loving on your dog for an hour you decide to take a walk, is your dog being reactive to its surroundings to a point that you cannot get them focused on you? If the answer here is yes, then ‘love’ is not creating a bond that will enable you to capture your pup’s attention in those trying times. Whatever is getting your dog to react is more important than the attention you have been giving.
What does it then mean to “engage” your dog then? It means that you have been offering direct interaction with your pup that makes you more interesting than the environment you find yourself in.
When working with puppies, what do the majority desire the most? Treats. When a distraction occurs, you need to be able to one, stop the puppy from ‘engaging’ the distraction. Using a leash solves this problem. Then, offer the puppy something more enticing than the distraction. A high value treat coupled with a higher pitched happy voice and definitely some movement backwards to draw them in, is required to get them ‘engaged’ (excited) with you. You have given the puppy something more interesting than the distraction and his/her focus is now on you.
As the puppy ages, treats will become less important and that instinctual prey drive increases. Have you ever seen a puppy clobber the rake while out cleaning up the fall leaves? Chase the mop as it swishes across the kitchen floor? To create a bond that has your dog truly focused on you, this prey drive needs to be developed into “play” drive. By playing with your dog, you are directly satisfying his/her prey drive. The dog knows that it will be rewarded by interacting with you.
Not all dogs know how to play, it needs to be taught to them. Two of the most effective toys to use to help with the play drive are a ball and a tug toy. Frisbees also make for an effective training tool.
To capture your dogs’ undivided attention, these toys need to be valuable to your dog. That begs the question, if you want to use a ball as the training tool, is having a bunch of balls lying around the house going to help with training? To answer this question, we have to ask ourselves what is valuable to us as a person? Is it something that is readily and easily accessible to us or something that is scarce and hard to obtain? Obviously, those items that are most desired are those that are almost always just out of reach. The tool should only be used when training-playing!
The next ingredient, just as important as the tool to be used to encourage play drive, is your energy that you bring to the play. Standing around and just tossing a toy is not getting your pup to engage with you. What happens when all you are doing is throwing the ball? Your dog is concentrating only on the ball. We need that focus on you. To do so, you need to draw your pup into you, not chase them. A good example. You execute a recall, the pup returns to you and you treat the recall. Once the pup has received its reward, it knows the ‘engagement’ is over and its focus ends. However, if once you have given that treat you explosively remove yourself from you dog (run backwards) and reward the pup for again running to you, you have now shown that the reward does not end with the first treat. The dog will play closer attention to you even after the first reward.
So, if you can properly engage your dog, you are effectively getting his/her attention or focus which in turn gets them to listen reliably to you. If you want that well-trained or well-mannered dog you need to invest the time and energy into engaging with your dog in a meaningful way.
Michael Ellis
Training Engagement before Obedience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPw60HX4DI4Why We Play with Dogs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-wpF4xpSKI