Teach Your Poodle to Recognize Her Name

Video Transcript

Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and today we’re going to talk about training dogs. Let’s train this standard poodle how to pay attention. You see, it’s early fall in Austin, Texas and the squirrels are everywhere, so Aida here is having a really hard time acknowledging that I even exist. Now, standard poodles in general are wonderful dogs. They’re considered non-sporting dogs, although they can be gun dogs. They’re great swimmers and good retrievers, but for the most part, people get standard poodles because they’re very bright, very loving, but they’re also very lively, so they need a lot of exercise—and the squirrel just took off, so we’re going to definitely have a challenge on our hands here teaching Aida to pay attention. I’m going to start off with a yummy treat in hand, let her know I have it. This means that there’s no chance of me working with Aida to teach her to pay attention until that little squirrel gets out of the way. If she’s not even attending to the treat, I’d be setting her up to fail by trying to work with her all at this point. Okay, the squirrel is out of the way, Aida finally looked at me and acknowledged my existence, so we’re going to start working on how to teach this standard poodle to pay attention. Let her know I have the treat, I’m going to lead it up to my eyes, Aida good, very nice, okay. All right, so we have to have her attention, we’re going to start working on the name game. I’m going to say her name, and then when she looks at me and acknowledges that she’s deferring to me and waiting for a cue about the appropriateness of behavior, I’m going to mark it and then give her a treat. Remember, we want our treats to be random. Now, if you have not looked at the other videos on building relationships and how to give commands, please do so before you proceed further with your standard poodle. Aida, good, mmm. So I’m going to wait till she’s distracted, now I need a squirrel. Now this is an example of a dog whose really food motivated, so I’m going to hide the treats, distract her a little, let her see the dogs over in the play yard may be, Aida good. Now there I had to actually use the treat as a lure to get her attention up to mine, and I’m going to completely ignore that jump. If we reinforce our dogs for jumping even by pushing them away, that’s the positive reinforcement. Aida, giving her a little help… uh-oh Mr. Squirrel is back. …good, excellent that was a really good example of how to get your dog to pay attention when she’s not. Be patient. This takes some time. Aida good, excellent. See when there are not too many distractions around, it’s not too difficult, Aida good, so given the number of distractions, we’re going to end with that success and go on to teach her how to sit.

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