2025 Intro + Music
===
[00:00:00] If you train, compete, or teach dog agility, you're in the right place. Hey there, I'm Megan Foster, creator of Fostering Excellence and Agility. Join me as I share key insights on all things related to dog agility and help find your team's path to excellence and unlock your best year yet. Let's get started.
Hey there. Today's episode is going to be about engagement, and I feel like training for engagement or training for focus can be talked about in a lot of different ways. So maybe this episode will give you some. New and different ideas, or maybe it will [00:01:00] solidify some things that you're already thinking about.
So first I wanna start with defining engagement for myself, and I feel like it is the result.
Of my dog, knowing that I have cool ideas and good things for them, and their confidence in how to access both of those things. So when I get my dog out of the car or I walk into a room with my dog, or we enter a new space, their baseline thought is, this is gonna be good for me. And their baseline behavior is I know how to get those good things.
So my first job when I'm working with a new to me puppy or new to me dog, is to learn what they like. I interact with them a lot at [00:02:00] home. I observe how they interact with the other dogs at home. I observe how they interact when they're by themselves, when they have lots of different things in their environment, and I try to.
Find ways that I can have those good ideas, those things that they naturally like, I need to add them to my toolbox so that I can use those in all sorts of different environments. So just learning how to play silly games with your dog, whether that's with food or toys or personal play. The more variety you have in the way that you can interact with your puppy or your dog, the easier it's going to be to convince them that you have good ideas and good things for them.
So that is the main. Thing to start with is understanding what your dog likes and if those are things that you can use in [00:03:00] training and when you're out in the world with them. The second thing that I do is I take my. Puppies places that I know that they will be safe. So I choose a variety of environments where there will be things for them to be exposed to, but that I have me, I have the means to keep them safe.
So it means that I have a way to leave that situation if the puppy is overwhelmed or over faced at any point. Or there are barriers in play so that nothing can get to my puppy. Then I just sit with them and I let them acclimate and I let them observe, and I let them explore the environment as much as they are comfortable and as safe, but I am not asking them to both process the world and engage with me at the same time.
I feel [00:04:00] like we have to start. With first letting them process the world around them, especially when they are young puppies. This also gives me the opportunity to observe if there is any point of concern during this observation phase. I. It means that if I see my dog taking pause to observe something in the environment, I'm also taking pause to notice what that is.
Not because I want to create a bunch of anxiety in my puppy's behavior, but I do want to know which triggers in the environment, which stimulation in the environment. Is more or less difficult for my dog to process so that I can choose my environments for training appropriately and also choose my environments for socialization appropriately.
Um, so very early on, my puppy sprint showed me concern about [00:05:00] people. So that really shaped. The choices that I made for her. So very early on I knew that her socialization around people was going to be in environments where people were going to ignore her versus environments where people were going to want to say hi to her.
So she did not socialize at dog agility events because people were going to want to say hi to her, and I knew that that wasn't going to be safe for her at that time. So taking your puppy places where you can actually see them, take in the environment and learn as much as you can about your puppy in that way is really valuable for knowing how to set up sessions later on.
So first and foremost, I am just allowing my puppy to take in the environment and most of the time. Uh, they will get bored with taking in their environment and they will [00:06:00] walk over to you and they will, you know, ask for. What good ideas did you bring to the table? And this is how my engagement training begins.
When the puppy's kind of done taking in their environment, they wander over. That's when I pull from that knowledge that I have been collecting about them, about the games that they like, about the food that they like, about the toys that they like about the little personal play, things that they enjoy, that we can engage in at home.
I ask for a little bit of that out in the world. There's no training attached to it. There's no pressure. It's just, Hey, I know that you like this game. Would you like to play it with me? And that might be for four or five seconds and then I leave.
Okay. Over time, my puppies are learning a lot of different skills in very easy [00:07:00] environments like my living room or like my home agility field, so that when I do take them different places, I have small questions that I can then ask them after they've asked to play good games with me. So still, when they are very young, there's.
A lot of acclimation involved it. There's a lot of can you be here comfortably and safely in this environment, and that goes quicker and quicker every time because of the consistency and predictability of my person has cool ideas and good things for me. And I can rely on that. So each time you take them out, they ask for those cool ideas and good things from you quicker and quicker.
And the more quickly that they ask for those things, the easier it is to add a little bit to the task. [00:08:00] So then it might be. A little bit of a game sandwich. So if they ask me for cool, cool things, it might start with little bit of a game, little bit of something that looks like work. So a simple trick, a simple task we've been working on, and then sandwich that with a little bit more game.
And I might do that for a while and eventually. That swaps, we change the order, we get out of the car. We do a very quick acclimation. This usually has a shift of you get outta the car and they're just gangbusters. They're ready to go. They know the pattern. They, they don't need to look around, they don't wanna look around.
Um, they're ready to go. And that's when I know I'm good to. Ask for the worky stuff first. So ask for the behaviors first, then follow it up with the game and the, and the cool stuff. And then that [00:09:00] session's over. And over time this grows. But a lot of people tend to want to jump into high stakes. Agility specific training first.
And that's also something I take a little bit different route when it comes to getting solid focus and engagement in novel places. Um, I. And so the, the skills that I'm first taking on the road are kind of boring, but they're very easy for the dog. So skills like reinforcer skills. So if you're not new around here, you know that I love having those clean reinforcer skills, those clean verbal cue systems so that the dog knows exactly what reinforcer is available and how they should access it.
So even though. That might [00:10:00] just feel like you're just giving them cool things for free. They are having to think about how to access those cool things. So being able to go to a novel location, acclimate, ask their person, okay, let's play a cool game, and then engage in a good game of just straight reinforcer skills.
That might be something that I ask my puppies and young dogs to do out in the wild, away from agility equipment. I will also ask them about downs, stays and stationing. So can they self-regulate into a lower level of arousal, even though they're anticipating cool things for them? And obviously, depending on the temperament of the dog, I might do more or less of that and depends on the context of the environment that we're in.
And also, like I said, the individual dog. I'm also [00:11:00] going to work on loosely sch walking and being able to navigate high levels of traffic or high levels of stimulation and things like that in novel environments away from agility. Um, just being able to offer eye contact is another easy, simple behavior that.
Once my puppies learn it, they get good at it really quickly, and they learn how to ask me for more support or more help, or more structure or more fun via eye contact. So having those skills really solid and being able to take those skills to a variety of locations. It helps you learn how your dog will need to acclimate and start work later on when you are in more high pressure, agility environments.
So my job is to take them to a variety of environments and [00:12:00] expose them to a variety of environments while keeping them safe and comfortable. I. And showing them how to opt in to the games that I would like to play with them, and then grow that game that we're playing systematically over time. And there are so many little details and nuances to this that will look different for each team that I can't possibly cover in a podcast.
But I do hope that. It helps you think of where you're taking your dogs to train and what you're focusing on when you train, if you are struggling to get them completely focused and engaged. I don't want to have to convince my dog to work with me. I want to know that they want to do the things that I would also [00:13:00] like to do, and we have to start.
Small a lot of the time to truly give them that choice and space to opt in or opt out. And speaking of opting out, I do find that as a dog's education grows the consequence for disengaging or leaving training. Also needs to grow. So when my puppies are super young and they have no idea about all the cool things that I have for them, and they get distracted by a leaf, it's blowing in the wind.
I wait them out. I let them explore that and decide that's not for me, that I'd rather go back to the game that I was playing. Or if we're playing a game and a person walks by and they want to [00:14:00] lift their head and watch that person, I let them do that. If they leave to check out that thing in the environment, I will help them back and show them that they didn't need to make that choice.
However, if we are a year or so into the process or any arbitrary number into the process, and this dog has shown me that. They don't need a lot of acclimation. They know how to opt in. They know how to tell me that they are ready to play the games. They are mid game. They're mid sequence. They're mid behavior, and then they leave.
I cannot do the same thing that I did when they were a baby and didn't know how to opt in. I do have to break that down for them and, and show them that if they choose to [00:15:00] leave in the middle of a sequence, that their turn will be over. And I feel like that is an important shift in the criteria for engagement that we cannot fairly put on the dog unless we have broken things down in the way that I.
Described earlier in this episode. I don't want to hold a dog responsible for something I don't feel like they know how to do.
I feel like often the agility task increases in difficulty. Before the dog really knows how to opt in and stay focused without a lot of external help from being shown reinforcers before training begins and being shown. All of the good stuff and the shift that I want to create is that the dog trusts.
That there will be good [00:16:00] stuff in this for them, and that we don't have to show them and shower them with reinforcement before they are willing to try something for us. And if you haven't made that shift in training, then you might be hitting this wall where you start to do an agility task and they are completely into it.
And then it gets a little bit difficult and they say, Ooh, I don't, I don't think I can do this. And they disengage in the middle of the session. Or they disengage when , the handler makes a mistake. Or if they make a mistake, they drop a bar or they go off course, they say, I can't do this anymore.
Because I don't truly think they know and trust that this is gonna be great for them. And so when it stops being great for them, they don't always know that they're gonna get that back. And that's where we have this sticking point.
All of this is to say [00:17:00] is if you are struggling to keep your dog engaged in training, you might take a step back and just get down to the basics of, does my dog know that I have cool ideas and good things for them? And if not, how can you start to repair that? I hope this has given you a little bit to think about, and I also just want to remind everyone listening, no matter where you are in your training journey with your dog, that this process is never truly linear.
Your training will and should be staggered.
You may be able to progress really quickly in some environments, whereas in others you might be at the acclimation stage for a long time. We just have to be willing to do [00:18:00] what each individual dog needs to make sure that they feel safe, comfortable, and know how to access those cool ideas and good things.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I really appreciate some feedback. You can leave me a review, engage on social media or share this with a friend. I hope you'll be back to listen to my next episode. In the meantime, you can find all of my offers on my website, fx agility.com. Happy training.
