Attention and Focus

Watchful 2/12/Vito, originally uploaded by manymuddypaws.

I've been working with Pixel in Obedience a lot lately- doing little bits of stuff every day. Her attention has improved a ton, and so of course has her heeling.

i like my dog to heel with her head up looking at me. She needs to be paying attention the whole time. This takes a lot of training, but I like the way the dog understands exactly what their job is.

I started attention heeling with Pixel when she was a baby. First completely stationary rewarding for eye contact, and then adding steps. Now the finished product is pretty, comfortable for both of us, and most importantly automatic.

It does take a lot of time though and if you skip steps, or move too fast you will have holes in the behavior that will likely bite you in the ass later on. I've tried to be very careful to not have that happen with Pixel. She doesn't like to be wrong ever, so if I train her right the first time we won't have to worry about that.

Now that we have fine tuned our actual heeling we are working on adding duration (i.e a heeling pattern), and distraction (i.e a ring setting) I wish there were more funmatches in my area- I think that Pixel would really benefit from that.

We are still working on other things- fronts in general. I obviously am missing something as none of my dogs have great fronts. Pixel is no exception although does have a general idea of what she is supposed to do. Her drop on recall is going to be lovely I think, and her stays are great.

We've also been working on the dreaded left pivots. This has involved a lot of perch work and a clicker. But we are getting there- which is exciting as the idea was completely foreign to her just a few months ago...

I am feeling optimistic about my goal for May in Open. If only I can stay focused for that long. :)