Story by Patricia Cook and Kari Cleland
Understanding engagement can help your dog training move to the next level. When in class, your dog might sit when you give the command, but if they keep looking at the team training next to you, they’re distracted. You might be able to redirect their focus back to you, but you haven’t captured their engagement. If they were engaged, they would not be interested in that dog or team at all. So, what exactly is engagement, and how do we build it?
CANINE ENGAGEMENT
Engaged dogs are actively involved in the activity you are performing together, and they don’t want it to end. Think of your dog’s face when you play fetch in the backyard. That happy, “throw it again!” face, the play bowing—that’s engagement. An engaged dog is 100 percent focused on their human. They want to work with you, and they ask for that interaction to happen. If you are the one trying to get your dog’s attention, your dog is not engaged.
Engagement is at the heart of successful training. It can be hard to capture and keep your dog engagement in a training situation. Many dogs are easily distracted by other dogs, smells, or people nearby. You are competing with all of those distractions in the environment. This is why engagement is a crucial skill in helping your dog learn to ignore distractions, regardless of the environment. Your dog will be focused only on you.
HOW TO BUILD ENGAGEMENT
Building engagement isn’t easy, particularly with puppies who are exploring a whole new world. But with time and commitment, you will have a dog that finds you the most wonderful, exciting, and interesting entity in the entire Milky Way.
To begin, play this game: get a handful of your dog’s favorite treats, and show them to your dog. If they make eye contact with you, reward them with one treat. Repeat this process for three or four treats. Then, when your dog is looking at you, toss the treat to the right or left.
If they run and get the treat, and return to you and immediately look at you, repeat this process, but throw the treat to the other side. Only throw the treat if the dog is looking at you—that’s engagement. Your dog is asking you to interact with them.
It might sound counterintuitive, but for this next exercise, you will need a dull or uninteresting location. Go somewhere with limited distractions and allow your dog to explore. When they get bored with sniffing and turn their attention to you, reward them. No cues, no bribes to get them to look at you. The reward is for their choosing to engage with you, not the environment.
In short, it was reinforced that you are the most exciting thing ever. Its attention should remain on you. If it wavers, your location isn’t quite dull enough, so start over somewhere else. That’s the first step in teaching engagement. There are additional steps to foster engagement that can be explored with a positive trainer.
ENGAGEMENT MAKES LEARNING FUN
Engagement fosters the bond with your dog. It encourages learning because if your dog is engaged with you, they are not distracted by the environment around them. An engaged dog will behave better when tested in a real-life situation. And it’s just more fun to work and play with a dog that wants to be there as much as you do.
For more information go to: The Complete Caine
