Distraction

What Is a Distraction?

A distraction is anything competing for your dog’s attention while you’re asking them to focus, learn, or perform a behavior.

People, dogs, squirrels, bicycles, smells, sounds, food, movement, and unfamiliar environments can all become distractions.

But there’s one important thing to remember:

The dog decides what’s distracting.

Something that barely registers to one dog may be incredibly difficult for another dog to ignore.

Distractions Change the Difficulty of a Behavior

Your dog may perform Sit, Down, Place, or Come perfectly in your living room and appear to suddenly “forget” everything outside.

They probably didn’t forget.

The environment changed.

A behavior that is easy in a quiet house can become significantly more difficult when competing with exciting smells, moving animals, unfamiliar people, or other dogs.

The behavior may be the same, but the level of difficulty isn’t.

Distance Matters

The closer a dog is to something they find exciting, interesting, frustrating, or concerning, the more difficult it may become for them to focus on you.

Moving farther away can lower the difficulty enough for the dog to think, respond, and learn.

As the dog becomes more successful, that distance can gradually decrease.

This is one reason working distance can be such an important part of training.

Don’t Add Every Distraction at Once

Training should become more difficult progressively.

If your dog has just learned a behavior in the house, asking for the same level of performance in a crowded park around dogs, people, bicycles, and squirrels may be too large a jump.

Instead, we gradually increase the difficulty while giving the dog opportunities to succeed.

The Bigger Picture

Reliable behavior isn’t created by eliminating distractions.

It’s created by teaching the dog how to perform even when distractions are present.

The goal isn’t to make the world less interesting.

It’s to help your dog learn that even when the world gets interesting, communication with you still matters.