ADD dog

Hallo Everyone,

  When I first started working with Kaylee my now almost eight month old Fila I thought she had ADD badly. Trying to get her to focus was darn near impossible! I swear I could hear the thoughts in her head every time we trained "Oh look a fly! Oh look some dust! Oh look the cat, Oh hi Mom, Oo my tail! look there is the fly again" Finally though I managed to catch her attention more and more and we worked on key points.

There are certain things in my house that we don't allow. We don't allow dogs to rush past us in or out of the house. They have to sit and wait until we say they can come in or out. We also don't allow them on the stairs if we're on the stairs because I don't want them knocking the kids down the stairs.

Both of our Fila's have learned these lesssons well. We got Serenity as a rescue when she was around 8mo's of age and it took her a couple months to figure it out. Kaylee had the rules figured out by the time she was six months old. Though being the alpha girl she is sometimes we have to have short intensive "re-training" lessons.

Now as bad as Kaylee was she has nothing on Lincoln! he's such a ditz! now I realise he's a couple weeks younger than Kaylee was when we got her and of a different breed. But trying to get him to focus is like mission impossible. Usually I try to use treats for the first couple of weeks then slowly wean them off of them. However with him he is *so* focused on the treat that I think we're going to have to skip them altogether.

I'm hoping that doing several 2 minute training sessions throughout the day will start to teach him to pay attention.

Not really any questions here, Just needed to vent to people who would understand.

Fargo is exactly the same way!  He's so focused on the treats that it's hard to train him.  I've found that formal obedience classes work wonders.  He does well enough at home but he's soooo much more focused in class!