# getting puppy to focus



## griz (Jan 1, 2001)

We have had our puppy 5 days( he is 9 weeks old) and from day one, we have tried to teach him his name. I wanted to do clicker training so we have been clicking and treating and clicking and treating and clicking and treating. High value treats, like tiny niblets of chicken breast. 
This is a WLGSD and his parents are both titled and while i haven't met them i saw their working videos and I know hes bred to work. He has zero interest in listening to anything we try to teach him, totally focus-less. UNLESS its the cat or the broom and then god himself couldn't take this puppy's attention away.

Also he used to follow me on the leash , now he refuses to follow me after 4 days of coming long nicely.Even with a lure of chicken or toy he doesn't want to follow me. 

I'm so upset because i thought this puppy would be a snap to train, he was "independently evaluated " at 7 weeks for his placement and he was given scores that would indicate high handler focus and working ability.

what am I doing wrong?


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## elisabeth_00117 (May 17, 2009)

What are you doing wrong?

Expecting WAY too much, way too fast.


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## cloudpump (Oct 20, 2015)

griz said:


> We have had our puppy 5 days( he is 9 weeks old) and from day one, we have tried to teach him his name. I wanted to do clicker training so we have been clicking and treating and clicking and treating and clicking and treating. High value treats, like tiny niblets of chicken breast.
> This is a WLGSD and his parents are both titled and while i haven't met them i saw their working videos and I know hes bred to work. He has zero interest in listening to anything we try to teach him, totally focus-less. UNLESS its the cat or the broom and then god himself couldn't take this puppy's attention away.
> 
> Also he used to follow me on the leash , now he refuses to follow me after 4 days of coming long nicely.Even with a lure of chicken or toy he doesn't want to follow me.
> ...


You are expecting too much out of a brand new puppy. Let him get used to you. 
To teach his name make it fun. Throw a treat. As soon as he gets it, call him back by saying his name. Treat. Then do it again.


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## griz (Jan 1, 2001)

tell me what I can expect at this age then please. I haven't had a puppy in 17 years .


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## cloudpump (Oct 20, 2015)

griz said:


> tell me what I can expect at this age then please. I haven't had a puppy in 17 years .


Not much.


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## griz (Jan 1, 2001)

cloudpump said:


> You are expecting too much out of a brand new puppy. Let him get used to you.
> To teach his name make it fun. Throw a treat. As soon as he gets it, call him back by saying his name. Treat. Then do it again.


thats what we are trying to do, with my husband and I sitting across from one another feet touching and calling his name with treats =zero interest in treats.


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## cloudpump (Oct 20, 2015)

I think he's just so new. He might be more toy driven.


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## squerly (Aug 3, 2008)

griz said:


> tell me what I can expect at this age then please. I haven't had a puppy in 17 years .


You can expect him/her to chew on everything, steal your shoes, pee on the floor and generally have a good time at your expense. As for training, probably not much.


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## Pawsed (May 24, 2014)

Remember, this is a very young puppy. You can't expect more of him than you would of a baby human being.

At this age, all I try to do is make their life fun and work on house training. That's more than enough for a pup that age.

Play with him without any expectations and let him learn to love you. That's your job for now. 

Let him move in and get comfortable with the household. You should have another 10+ years for training. Relax and enjoy your new family member.


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## Femfa (May 29, 2016)

Yep, agree with everyone else - we're hoping to bring a pup home soon too, but I keep reminding myself and my partner that we need to enjoy that time rather than focus on what the dog can or can't do.


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## Jax08 (Feb 13, 2009)

You need to play games with him. I'll send you a message tonight with different games. The focus and relationship will come thru those. Have lots of treats Handy! ?


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## Cassidy's Mom (Mar 30, 2003)

What times of the day are you working on focus and name recognition - before a meal, when he's hungry, or after he's already eaten? Have you tried using his meals to do this kind of training? 

Some dogs are more food motivated than others. Both Keefer and Halo are so into food that they could train immediately after a meal work for any kind of food, even more kibble. But not every dog will. With that kind of dog, I'd definitely train when its hungry.

And as Jax mentions, games are good. Playing with your dog is a great way to work on engagement and build a relationship.


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## Jenny720 (Nov 21, 2014)

It has not been a full week yet. The pup is adjusting to a new family and home. Once your pup is settled you will see more focus.


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## Dotbat215 (Aug 19, 2015)

Think of him like a toddler...too young for structured school learning but through games and play is learning so much about you and the world.


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## Muskeg (Jun 15, 2012)

I agree with expecting too much too soon but I would expect a working pup to be very food motivated and easy to work for things like luring for heeling foundation and for basics like place, and positions. This is littermate to my pup, practicing foundations at 10 weeks,



, which is pretty easy to do with a motivated workingline pup. I wasn't quite as advanced with my girl, Pemi, at that age, but that was on me, she was and still is very food motivated and easy to train. 

I'd try to keep things super short and fun, but not having any food drive does make it tough to train for sport- food drive makes everything much easier especially for a less experienced handler. My pup was doing the prancy heeling dance at 8 weeks, and very motivated for food and toys both. Not super long focus, but I could easily get about 5 minutes out of her at a time. 

Toy motivation is great, of course, but it's nice to have both for training foundations. When I break out a tug, it's more to work on grip and bite work, not for training new things, at least at this point. Much of the grip is genetic, anyway, as is food drive, but you can certainly build up both toy and food drive in (almost) any dog.


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## Dracovich (Feb 24, 2017)

At 5 days there's probably little to no bond, you're slowing the bond down by trying to get your pup to do things it doesn't want to. 

When I get a new dog I ask nothing of it that it doesn't want to do for the first two to four weeks depending on the dog. I'd not expect my dogs to obey strangers, and for the first few weeks you ARE a stranger to your own dog. Puppies bond much faster which is a plus, but you're still going too fast.

Focus on potty training and crate training, the name will come along naturally and leash training will get easier as your pup starts to trust you more.


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## WateryTart (Sep 25, 2013)

cloudpump said:


> You are expecting too much out of a brand new puppy. Let him get used to you.
> To teach his name make it fun. Throw a treat. As soon as he gets it, call him back by saying his name. Treat. Then do it again.


I agree. Play the name game and make it fun.

I'd have my puppy sitting and when she looked away, I'd call her name and say, "Yes!" and treat immediately when she looked. Cloudpump's way looks like it could be more fun for the puppy, though.


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## Cassidy's Mom (Mar 30, 2003)

Dracovich said:


> *At 5 days there's probably little to no bond*, you're slowing the bond down by trying to get your pup to do things it doesn't want to.
> 
> *When I get a new dog I ask nothing of it that it doesn't want to do for the first two to four weeks depending on the dog*.


Yes, but. Puppies have very short attention spans, and a brand new puppy has been removed from mom, littermates, and everything that was familiar and thrust into a new home, with new people. Bonding does take time to develop, but that doesn't mean you can't start training right away, it just means that you should be mindful of HOW you train, and to not expect too much too fast. I can't imagine wasting the first few weeks my puppy is home when I can be doing so much during that valuable time! 

The way I like to train a new puppy is by capturing behaviors the puppy offers up spontaneously, reinforcing those behaviors by marking and rewarding. I'm not asking for anything in particular, I'm not telling my puppy what to do. This is actually a great way to work on focus and name recognition, and you can either use a verbal marker ("yes!"), or a clicker. 

The general rule with clicker training is that you first load the clicker by pairing it with a reward (usually food, but doesn't have to be), associating the sound of the marker with something good. But rather than simply spending some time repeating click/treat to load the clicker I've found that you can really start using it immediately to capture and reward spontaneous behavior. Puppy sits - click/treat. Puppy lays down - click/treat. Puppy looks at you, or puppy starts walking towards you - click/treat. You can put these on cue later, once the pup is offering behaviors more regularly. And since he's getting yummy treat for doing things, he's going to start doing them more. I can get several repetitions of puppy laying down if when I mark it I toss the treat a few feet away, so she has to get up to get it. Then I simply wait for her to lay down again. Rinse/repeat. Each brief session can be just a few minutes or even a couple of repetitions, and you can do several a day. 

We had a 10 hour drive home from Oregon with Dena, and I didn't even wait until we were home to start training! My husband drove, and I sat in the backseat next to her crate. She cried a lot and she slept some, but when she was awake I was marking and rewarding attention, and teaching her her name. She, Keefer, and Halo all had a couple of weeks of training at home before we started puppy class, and all of them were way ahead of the other puppies in their classes. I think Dena had 5 or 6 weeks, Keef had 4 weeks and Halo had about 3 weeks. 

Halo was pretty wild the first week of class (these were off leash classes with up to a dozen puppies in the room), but by week 2 she was laying on the floor, off leash, staring at me with a treat on the floor in front of her. In those three short weeks we had done extensive work on impulse control and focus, so even at just 13 weeks old she was capable of tuning out some pretty major distractions and recognized that the way to get the food was to ignore the food. After class another woman stopped me in the bathroom before we left to ask how I'd trained that kind of focus. In 13 week old puppy that we'd only had 3 weeks. 

I also have a couple pictures that my husband took on Keefer's first day of puppy class, staring intently at me. There were times when he was so close to another pup in class that their tails were touching, but he only had eyes for me. Again - extensive focus work starting as soon as he came home. And during one of Dena's classes we were all sitting on the floor with our puppies while the instructor was talking, and Dena had rolled over on her side to chill. The woman next to me said "you've been working with her a lot, haven't you?" I said I had, and she said "it shows". I don't recall exactly how old Dena was at the time, but it would have been somewhere between 14 and 19 weeks old.

Other than attention, sit, down, a recall, walking next to me with a lure (with right and left turns and automatic sits when I stop), and impulse control, I also teach touch (targeting exercise of a nose bump to my palm), and find it - look for a treat on the floor/ground. We play recall games around the house, and work on a "whiplash" turn, where the puppy's head whips around immediately at the sound of his/her name. All of this is in brief, fun, upbeat sessions, appropriate for a young puppy.


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## Jax08 (Feb 13, 2009)

I do the name game like Cloudpump does. There are other games and I'm looking for my notes. Hope I don't have to type them all up again!!!


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## Dracovich (Feb 24, 2017)

Cassidy's Mom said:


> Yes, but. Puppies have very short attention spans, and a brand new puppy has been removed from mom, littermates, and everything that was familiar and thrust into a new home, with new people. Bonding does take time to develop, but that doesn't mean you can't start training right away, it just means that you should be mindful of HOW you train, and to not expect too much too fast. I can't imagine wasting the first few weeks my puppy is home when I can be doing so much during that valuable time!
> 
> The way I like to train a new puppy is by capturing behaviors the puppy offers up spontaneously, reinforcing those behaviors by marking and rewarding. I'm not asking for anything in particular, I'm not telling my puppy what to do. This is actually a great way to work on focus and name recognition, and you can either use a verbal marker ("yes!"), or a clicker.
> 
> ...


By 'anything it doesn't want to do' I merely meant anything that would cause a strain in the bond. If a puppy wants to do something for the reward of the treat I feel that *strengthens* the bond. Forcing a puppy to walk on leash politely could potentially slow progress down, but if you can coax the puppy into learning to walk nicely without a struggle from the pup then I see no problem.

Some puppies are extremely opposed to leash training. I put a leash on my GSD when he was a pup and let him drag it around for about 10 minutes, he bit it a couple times then was perfectly fine. I don't feel like that was forcing him to do anything.


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## griz (Jan 1, 2001)

Cassidy's Mom said:


> I can get several repetitions of puppy laying down if when I mark it I toss the treat a few feet away, so she has to get up to get it. Then I simply wait for her to lay down again. Rinse/repeat. Each brief session can be just a few minutes or even a couple of repetitions, and you can do several a day.
> 
> .


I dont know what age to expect "more" but right now, if I tried that, the puppy probably wouldn't run to get the treat. More like watch it and continue doing his own thing.

He does have a food drive and I do believe he was pretty overwhelmed at first. I am seeing that when he is over tired he turns into a whirling dervish and can not focus on anything.
He is responding well to the name game but he definitely you can tell when he's had enough. we had a few moments where i was like OMG THIS PUPPY IS A GENIUS, and many more! LOL


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## Lrd (Oct 15, 2020)

griz said:


> We have had our puppy 5 days( he is 9 weeks old) and from day one, we have tried to teach him his name. I wanted to do clicker training so we have been clicking and treating and clicking and treating and clicking and treating. High value treats, like tiny niblets of chicken breast.
> This is a WLGSD and his parents are both titled and while i haven't met them i saw their working videos and I know hes bred to work. He has zero interest in listening to anything we try to teach him, totally focus-less. UNLESS its the cat or the broom and then god himself couldn't take this puppy's attention away.
> 
> Also he used to follow me on the leash , now he refuses to follow me after 4 days of coming long nicely.Even with a lure of chicken or toy he doesn't want to follow me.
> ...


Don't be discouraged puppies go through stages stay positive stay consistent redirect when they're doing something you don't want them to positive reward when they do something good keep things simple and show them that you have a stronger will and can be more stubborn my female can be very stubborn at times there's certain things that she likes to get into and I can move her away and tell her no and move her away and tell her no and move her away and it can make you crazy but but your will just has to be stronger refocus them and something else if you haven't been using a leash much keep a leash on the puppy more often so they can't walk away from you and have to listen don't give in but always positive reward


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## dogma13 (Mar 8, 2014)

Another very old thread


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## WNGD (Jan 15, 2005)

The puppy is now 4 years old, I hope he got it to listen to him by now


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## Chip Blasiole (May 3, 2013)

Describe the details of how you do clicker training and how are you limiting his food.


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## David Winners (Apr 30, 2012)

After 3 failures at punctuation, I stop reading.


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