How to train a very distracted dog?
Macey Hagenes
2025-05-20 00:56:24
Count answers: 3
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.