This is absolutely the most common and biggest mistake I see people making. OK, so it's not actually that simple.

When you are working on recall, on attention around distractions that your dog finds interesting, or obedience type stuff, we absolutely want to either ask our dog to look at us and pay them a treat, or wait for them to look at us and then give them that treat or toy or whatever. But not when we are training a reactive dog. Reactivity training is different.

We WANT our dogs to look at 'the thing'

Whether you are training dogs who fight in the home, introducing a new puppy, or working on reactivity out in the world, we WANT our dogs to look. We want them to loo, but not stare or fixate. Training this is a bit of an art and the method varies from dog to dog, but the looking is very important.

Grizzley Bear Analogy

I have a few bear analogies! Imagine you are out on a walk and there's a big ol' grizzly down the street, maybe even heading your way. Now imagine I ask you to look at me, not at the bear! I wave cheese in front of your nose and say "Hey! Look at me and I'll give you cheese!"

You'd think I was nuts, and perhaps a little on the slow-witted side! This is what a lot of us do to our dogs.

Some people have changed this up a bit and wait for their dog to check in... "Hey person, do you see that bear??????" Then we give the cheese.

A dog who really loves cheese or really wants to please us might then look at us for the cheese, even though they would feel more comfortable keeping an eye on the bear.

It creates the exact same problem as above, but here we have even less influence on our dog's behaviour!

TLDR...

There are different kinds of training. Sometimes we want our dog's attention on us and we don't want our dog to look at stuff in the environment. But this is not going to fix reactivity.

If we are training dogs to get along at home or working on reactivity out in the world, we NEED our dogs to look, but not fixate. Not sure how? Ask for help =)

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