SDS – Lesson 5 – Stim Control Copy

Improving attention

The final video in this course explains how to further improve your dogs attention. We share with you exercises which help to keep your dog engaged and get ready to move on to work with distractions or other more advanced exercises such as recall.

Dogs very quickly, because of the way we tend to walk particular routes quickly get into an A-B mentality. Once a dog assumes it knows that it will continue walking in the same direction they quickly start pulling on lead.

This next exercise helps your dog understand that you may change direction at any time and that he or she should always be ready for you to move in any direction.

Start moving forwards with your dog at heel and then, when you are ready, reverse and start walking backwards. Your dog should turn to face you and follow you, once this has happened, turn to your right and walk forwards again which puts your dog back at heel.

If your dog doesn't turn to change direction with you then be sure to give an appropriate tug on the lead.

Pay particular attention to how the dogs level of engagement rises once the handler starts using this exercise.

Once you've got this exercise working well I want you to bring everything you have learnt together. Use a series of corrections, food rewards, pace changes and forward/backward direction changes to test that your dog has a good understanding of what we are asking for.

Before we move you on to more advanced courses we need to double check that everything is working well at this level. The key to every problem you could have out and about with your dog is to have your dog in a very attentive state of mind. As shown in the video I want you to completely loosen off your lead and check that your dog is really with you.