How to train a very distracted dog?
Cheyenne Abernathy
2025-05-27 18:26:50
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To train a very distracted dog, managing your dog’s threshold is important, as dogs have a ‘threshold’ distance where they’ll be able to show calm behaviours, take food and respond when we interact with them. Monitoring your dog’s body language will help to understand when they are approaching their ‘threshold’. Over time, and with lots of practice, you should be able to expand your dog’s threshold and get them to remain calm in more stimulating situations. Teaching your dog a ‘watch me’ cue, as well as practicing their reflex to their name being called, will be helpful when getting your dog’s focus around distractions. While training your dog to respond to you, remember not to throw them in the deep end and expect them to respond in a park full of distractions. Instead, try to increase the level of distraction slowly during training sessions. For example, you could practice 'watch me’ in the garden before trying this out in a public area. Reward your dog for noticing a distraction, and once your dog reliably looks at you when they notice a distraction, you can start to wait for them to look at you before marking and rewarding them. Gradually get closer to the distraction and repeat, ensuring that whenever they check in with you, you mark and reward. If your dog begins to stare at the distraction, you can use another cue, like ‘watch me’ or their name, to prompt them to look back at you.
Macey Hagenes
2025-05-20 00:56:24
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Play must always come first so that you are interesting and relevant. Play a lot, play at least once a day for 20-30 minutes per session. This makes you interesting and makes it much easier to say “hey, don’t worry about that squirrel.” We want to positively condition a way to get their attention when they’re focused on other things, and you can do this a number of ways. We would start with leash pressure most likely, as that’s the easiest form of communication for your pup to understand, and teach them that when they follow the leash pressure, they get praise and reward. Once they understand that easy form of communication, we can use it to teach other forms of communication. We can then use that to teach them how to understand an electronic collar, which is a great form of communication to teach your dog how and when to pay attention to you even under distraction. Much like the leash, we would start with low levels of distraction and practice understanding the language before we graduated to those bigger distractions.
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