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Question regarding eye contact for those of you with some training experience!
Back story: attention is the first thing I worked on with Raffi when we got him. Starting with quietly standing and waiting for him to make eye contact, then marking and rewarding. Progressing to longer eye contact and more distractions. I never put a command to it but try to reward even with just a pat when he offers eye contact throughout the day.
We have recently started training classes. As you would expect, attention is one of the first things that was introduced in class. Raffi does very well at this during class too, with all the distractions around us. The instructor mentioned this week starting to add a command like "watch me".
Is there a purpose or benefit to adding the command? My thought was that I want him to offer attention without being asked (I followed "Attention is the Mother" from Puppy Culture, for anyone familiar with that).
I have been considering continuing his training (Rally, obedience, or agility) since he picks things up so well. I have only done agility and only non-competitively with a previous dog, so that part will be new to me. Is there a purpose to having the watch me command for advanced training? I am trying my best to introduce "proper" positioning and signals from the get-go so that it will be easier to jump in to whatever ends up suiting us best.
Haha, my question is more like a story, so hopefully what I am asking makes sense!
Back story: attention is the first thing I worked on with Raffi when we got him. Starting with quietly standing and waiting for him to make eye contact, then marking and rewarding. Progressing to longer eye contact and more distractions. I never put a command to it but try to reward even with just a pat when he offers eye contact throughout the day.
We have recently started training classes. As you would expect, attention is one of the first things that was introduced in class. Raffi does very well at this during class too, with all the distractions around us. The instructor mentioned this week starting to add a command like "watch me".
Is there a purpose or benefit to adding the command? My thought was that I want him to offer attention without being asked (I followed "Attention is the Mother" from Puppy Culture, for anyone familiar with that).
I have been considering continuing his training (Rally, obedience, or agility) since he picks things up so well. I have only done agility and only non-competitively with a previous dog, so that part will be new to me. Is there a purpose to having the watch me command for advanced training? I am trying my best to introduce "proper" positioning and signals from the get-go so that it will be easier to jump in to whatever ends up suiting us best.
Haha, my question is more like a story, so hopefully what I am asking makes sense!