Jane Killion Seminar: Attention is a Behavior, and You Can Teach It!

Does your dog blow you off, ignore you, or run away? Do you feel frustrated by his lack of focus? Do you want him to pay more attention to you? Well, you’re in luck, because Jane told us at the seminar that attention is a behavior, and you can teach it. Today I’m going to share Jane’s two-step method for creating an attentive dog.

Step 1: Teach the Concept
You might think you’ve done this. After all, you’re a caring dog owner interested in training, so you’ve probably taught your dog to make eye contact when cued. But this, Jane argued, is missing the point. As she put it, attention is like respect. If you have to ask for it, you’ll never get it. If you’re calling your dog, nagging him, or begging for attention, then he’s learned nothing… except maybe that he can disengage from you to do whatever he’d like because you’ll let him know when it’s time to pay attention.

What Jane wants is a dog who chooses to be attentive. To that end, the concept Jane encouraged us to teach is not cued eye contact, nor is it for the dog to ignore distractions when told. Instead, she said that true attention is achieved when the dog learns that distractions themselves are cues to focus on the handler. In other words, when the dog realizes there is something interesting out there, he should not only ignore it, but also make eye contact with his handler without being told to do so.

Jane starts teaching this by letting the dog know that eye contact is a behavior he can offer in order to receive a click and treat. She showed us how to do that by putting a dog on leash and simply waiting. When the dog would make eye contact, no matter how briefly, she would click and treat. She had each dog/handler team repeat this until it was clear the dog understood that he can make the click happen by offering eye contact.

With this foundation in place, Jane began to raise the criteria using the classic technique of introducing distractions. Jane had the handlers hold a fistful of treats out to the side. Most dogs will stare at the food when this happens, and our working dogs were no exception. Again, Jane just had the handlers wait. She cautioned that they should not call the dogs, make noises, or otherwise prompt them to make eye contact. Simply wait. When the dog looked, he would get a click and treat. Again, she had the teams repeat the exercise until it was clear the dog was offering attention as a behavior to earn the treats.

But remember, the concept is not simple eye contact; Jane’s goal was for the dogs to learn that those distractions are a cue for the dog to pay attention to the handler. Because of this, Jane does not want a dog to look away from the handler, check out the distraction, and then look back. Instead, she wants the dog to understand that as soon as he’s aware of the distraction, he should put his complete focus on his handler. So instead of making the distraction bigger or harder, Jane actually had the working teams raise the criteria by only clicking when the dog refused to look at the distraction.

Here’s how the exercise was set up: the handler would present a distraction (usually by holding a handful of treats out to the side), and the dog would be allowed to look at it, then look at his handler and earn a click/treat. The handler would then remove the distraction (by putting her behind her back, for example), and then present it again, which started the exercise over. After a few reps, the criteria would be raised. Now the dog would only get clicked if he maintained eye contact and ignored the distraction. The first few times, the dog would look at the distraction before looking back at his handler. However, now that the criteria had been raised, he would not get clicked for this. Every single dog soon realized that he shouldn’t look at the distraction at all, and thus would choose to keep looking at his handler, which earned him a click and treat. It was pretty awesome to watch.

Step Two: Work the Envelope
Once the dog learned the concept, Jane began to do what she calls “working the envelope.” This is the phrase Jane uses to describe the process of gradually making the training task more difficult. She would change one thing at a time, with the goal being that the change was large enough that the dog would notice, but not so large that he couldn’t quickly return his attention to his handler.

Tibby has figured out that when Jane moves towards her, she should look at her mom.

Again, she would allow a few reps of look-at-the-distraction-then-back-at-the-handler before requiring the dog to ignore the distraction entirely in order to get clicked. Each team worked with different levels of distraction. For more novice dogs, the handful of treats might simply be moved closer to his face, while more advanced dogs were required to ignore Jane while she stepped towards them or crinkled a treat bag.

Although she couldn’t demonstrate the entire evolution of the process due to time constraints, Jane did share that pretty much all training is just an expansion of the attention concept. What’s more, she stated that pretty much every problem you have with your dog’s performance is because he doesn’t understand the concept of attention. She even argued that teaching solid attention skills is at the core of working with reactivity or aggression. While I think attention skills are helpful, I know from my own experiences with Maisy that it's not a one-size-fits-all solution, and I have my doubts that what I saw would have worked.

But that is for another post. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from others. How have you taught attention skills? What do you think of Jane's method? Do you cue attention, or have you taught your dog to view the distraction itself as the cue?

CU Seminar: Reorienting

This dog does a great job of reorienting to Alexa.
Photo by Robin Sallie.

One of the first exercises we worked on at the Control Unleashed seminar was reorienting. Although Leslie talks about reorienting in the book, I’ve never really thought about it as a CU exercise, mostly because it is deceptively simple. Simply put, reorienting means that any time your dog passes through a boundary- a door way, coming out of his crate, walking into the obedience ring- he should turn to sit in front of you, all while making eye contact.

There are lots of benefits to teaching a dog to reorient. It creates a routine for the dog, which pretty much all dogs like. For reactive dogs, though, it creates a sense of predictability, and helps them know both what to expect, and what is expected of them. This relieves some of their anxiety.

Reorienting also teaches the dog impulse control; instead of rushing off to check out the exciting new environment, the dog learns to contain himself and check in with you first. This, in turn, leads to increased team work and attention to the handler- skills we definitely want in our performance dogs!

Finally, reorienting helps mitigate some of the sudden environmental changes that happen when you move from one location to another, largely because the dog becomes patterned to look at you automatically instead of scanning the environment for a potential trigger.

Ironically, after Alexa discussed the value of reorienting at the seminar on Saturday, I experienced first hand how valuable reorienting can be. Maisy and I were walking out of our hotel room, and as we headed into the hallway, an older man was walking towards us. Because Maisy has not learned to automatically reorient to me, she shot to the end of her leash and barked and growled. She was truly over threshold; nothing I said or did was able to get her attention. Although I’m quite sure she would have been nervous about the man no matter what, I believe that if she’d been conditioned to automatically turn to me, there is a decent chance I could have prevented that reaction. Needless to say, I’m going to teach Maisy to reorient!

So, how do you teach reorienting? Alexa had us start with the dogs exiting their crates. In turn, we each opened the crate door and fed a constant stream of treats as long as the dog remained inside the crate. If he tried to exit without a release cue, we calmly shut the crate door and then tried again. Pretty soon, we had a group of dogs that really enjoyed being in their crates! This step helped create some impulse control in the dogs.

Next, we stood next to the crate so that we were facing the same direction as our dogs, and called them out. As they did, we watched for the tiniest movement in our direction. Even an ear flick or a slight head turn earned the dog a click and treat. Each time, we waited for a little bit more of a turn in our direction. It really didn’t take long for the dogs to rush out, make the u-turn towards us, and plop down, watching us expectantly. (The sit, while not necessary, is nice. It is an added demonstration of self-control, and it also means that if your dog is feeling especially wild, you have a better chance of catching him if he's loose.)

Astute readers will notice that we didn’t give any cues, verbal or otherwise. We didn’t ask them to “wait” before getting out of the crate, and we didn’t call their name or otherwise ask them to pay attention to us. This was a deliberate choice, because we want the dog to learn to reorient to us based on environmental cues. The cue to seek out the handler is the transition from one location to another, not anything we said or did. This gives the dog the ability to think and make the right choice, which creates both confidence and self-control. It also means that you don’t need to be constantly nagging your dog with commands, something that I find mighty appealing.

Once the dogs were easily reorienting while coming out of their crates, we worked on reorienting while walking into a box made out of ring gates. Again, the process was similar. We would approach the opening to the ring, and stop and wait. Some dogs automatically reoriented, while others would take a few moments before they turned back towards their handlers, impatient about the lack of movement. At the first sign of turning towards us, we clicked! We repeated the process again as we moved through the gate into the interior of the ring. After only a few repetitions, the dogs were offering up the reorienting behavior on their own.

This is something that would be easy to practice at home. Practice it when your dog comes out of his crate, as you let him into the back yard, or as you go through the gate to your fenced in yard. All of these are pretty low-distraction environments, so it should be easy for your dog to learn. Once he gets good at the game, you can make it more challenging by putting a toy or bowl of treats on the other side of the boundary.

Reorienting a simple behavior, but it’s a powerful one, too. Like I said, I’ll definitely be working on this one with Maisy. But I want to hear from you guys. Have you taught your dogs to reorient? Has it ever helped you and your dog? I’d love to hear your examples!