Teaching a Goldendoodle to Focus to Improve Her Behavior

For this Omaha dog training session we taught 3 year-old Goldendoodle Polly to Focus on command to help her guardians redirect her to attention and stop her demand barking, getting over excited and reacting to dogs she sees on walks.

Polly did quite a bit of demand barking to start the session, dropping a ball at her guardians feed and barking to get her to throw it. I had the guardians ignore this behavior at first, then showed the guardian how to use this as a teachable moment.

As soon as Polly sat down, the guardian picked up the item and threw it. This is a great way to communicate that doing a desired action will get a human’s attention. Coupled with ignoring the demand barking, the family can teach Polly that barking for attention no longer works.

To help Polly start to see and respect her guardians as authority figures, I shared a number of dog behavior tips such as adding rules, enforcing them consistently, petting with a purpose and recognizing desired behaviors and rewarding them to motivate Polly to behave how her guardians want her to.

One of the dog behaviorist tips I shared was how to train Polly to look up at the human’s face on command. I showed Polly’s guardians how to train a dog to focus on command using a simple positive dog training technique. You can find out how to teach a dog to focus by watching this free dog training video.

If Polly’s guardians practice this focus exercise as detailed in the video, they will be able to redirect her as soon as she starts to get into trouble. Just like humans, its easier to get a dog to redirect if you catch them early on.

Later in the session we headed out for a walk so I could see how reactive Polly is around other dogs. She clearly has a strong reaction to dogs at this point. My hope is that as the humans practice the dogs behavior tips inside the house to flip the leader follower dynamic, her dog aggression should dissipate. But based on how reactive she was, Im guessing we will need to set up a follow up session to do some Behavior Adjustment Training.

To help the guardians remember all the positive dog training tips we covered in this at home dog training session, we shot a roadmap to success video hat you can check out below.