by Diane Garrod

Created on: May 02, 2009   Last Updated: January 18, 2010

In training your dog yourself, there are three vital skills forming the foundation for all other training. FIrst, attention in the form of willing eye contact from your dog is a basic and needed skill. If you don't have attention from your dog, you have nothing. It is the basis for everything else you do and keeps the focus on you. Your dog should offer it willingly, without a cue and it will strengthen your dog's dedication to all other cues you give. So whether it is a companion dog or one who competes in dog sports, attention is where your training should begin.

Here are the three vital skills required for training your dog yourself. They will come in handy on trail walks, in any dog sport, and in just having a wonderful companion to enjoy life from day to day.

The training trilogy goes like this:

1 - Attention Work

2 - Recall - (Coming When Called)

3 - Impulse Control (Relaxing postures of sit, and down; stay; and leave it)

All of these are taught in steps. These are the three skills you want strong and immediate.

ATTENTION

Attention work starts with name response, name response plus cue addition, and Increasing Attention. All this is done WITHOUT prompting the dog to look at you. The key is that your dog looks attentively to you automatically. Why? If you prompt your dog to look at you, they will only look at you when you prompt them to do so.

What you want is an automatic eye contact without asking. This creates a reliable canine. Attention means checking in on trails, look backs in distance work, attention in the show ring for a full 10 minutes, engaged skill work, and much more. A reliable and attentive canine is a joy to work with and I use this technique especially when training reactive or aggressive dogs. Looking to you for information and automatically is something you can't put a price on.

Once you train the above, you can start to pair attention with other skills, such as sit plus attention, down plus attention. You reward only for attention paired with other skills. Then you can train advanced attention, such as turning back to you after going out doors, attentive heeling, attention with distractions. The last is especially important if you have a reactive or aggressive dog.

RECALL

Recall work goes without explanation. Everyone knows how valuable it is and if you have trained a solid name recognition and then added the cue for your recall, you will be ahead of the class. The key to recall is it needs to be done successfully at least 6000 times,

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