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Sustained Engagement is Not Easy

By Ed Frawley

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We get training questions through our Ask Cindy portal every day. Many of which are about problems in engagement training.

Understanding how to put sustained engagement on cue is really the art of dog training, which is why we say “Engagement is simple, but not easy.”

We define Engagement as getting our dogs to offer sustained focus on the trainer because the dog wants what we have whether it be their favorite toy or their favorite high-value food reward.

The keyword in our description is "sustained" focus. It’s easy to get a dog to focus on us for a few seconds, just show them a piece of meat or let them see you holding their dog food bowl. It’s a totally different thing to get a dog to continue to focus on us throughout a training session.

The most common mistake new trainers make is they expect too much too soon. By that I mean:

They expect a puppy or young dog to engage for minutes, rather than seconds.
They expect an untrained dog to engage when they take it to an environment filled with distractions.
They expect their new dog to engage before they have built a relationship with their dog.
They assume they have their dog's favorite toy or favorite high-value food reward, when in fact they don’t, based on the environment the dog is in.

Getting sustained focus doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a process that the dog learns over time.

We recently got a question through our ASK CINDY PORTAL on Leerburg.com from a new rescue dog owner who was trying to get engagement with their dog in the park with a remote collar. This person was making three mistakes, they had not built a relationship with their dog, they should have been training in a distraction-free environment, and in my opinion (while it may be possible for a professional trainer) using a remote collar to get engagement is dead wrong.

We start every training session by saying (in an excited tone of voice) "ARE YOU READY?" When they look at us, we reward the look with a reward of some kind. It doesn’t take long for a dog to learn that good things happen when we say "ARE YOU READY?" This can happen in days not weeks or months. Our goal in doing this is to put engagement on cue, with the cue being “Are You Ready?”

When we start, it is easy to get a puppy excited by showing it a tempting piece of meat. But once the dog has the meat, then what? That’s where training starts.

That’s where we go from simply giving the dog one food reward to building "reward events". With reward events, we stay excited over what the dog just did, and we vary how many rewards we give the dog. We may give the 2 – 3 –4 or 5 food rewards. With the goal being that the dog never knows when we are done giving the rewards. We don’t want them anticipating the end and checking out.

Trainers who only give their dog one reward item quickly see their dog check-out after it gets a treat.

Using reward events in your training sessions is how to build and maintain engagement. Our goal is to develop training sessions where the dog loves training. We don’t want them to look forward to the end of the session, rather we want them to stay engaged because they don’t want the training to end. Keeping training sessions short is one of the ways that happens.

In my opinion, new trainers need to learn the art of using food rewards in their training sessions as the first step for all of this to happen. I have an excellent course that I finished in 2024 on the subject. We also offer DVDs, streams, and courses on engagement, but those courses should be taken after the trainer knows and understands training with food.

Part of this concept is to keep training sessions short.

For those readers who are new to reward-based training, you can learn how we train sustained engagement by viewing the online course we produced with Michael Ellis called The Power of Training Dogs with Food.

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About Author

Ed Frawley

Ed Frawley is the founder of Leerburg. He has been training dogs since the 1950s. For 30 years, Ed bred working bloodline German Shepherds and has produced over 350 litters. During this time, Ed began recording dog training videos and soon grew an interest in police service dogs. His narcotic dogs have been involved in over 1,000 narcotics searches resulting in hundreds of arrests in the state of Wisconsin. Ed now solely focuses on producing dog training courses with renowned dog trainers nationwide. If you want to learn more about Ed, read about his history here.