I've read snippets of people's experience using LAT in several posts and I thought I'd once seen a LAT training blog by someone but I can't seem to find it now when I'm ready to try it myself. If I try to search the forums for "LAT" or "Look at that" it won't return any results because the terms are too common or too short. I've read Control Unleashed so am familiar with how it works. What I really need to supplement it is just some moral support and the encouragement of someone else's success. My (2+ year old) pup, Killah, will run a mile to greet a dog he sees in the distance - well, maybe not a mile but he once swam across a river and ran up a brambly bank to get to a dog he saw walking on the opposite side. Mortifying! Luckily the other dog's owner was just surprised and had a good laugh rather than taking offence. After a bit of butt sniffing and running to and fro with the other dog he came back to his whistle, although I'll admit I didn't try to recall him earlier because I knew it would be futile. 99 times out of a hundred he just needs to greet the dog and then he'll come straight back to me - he doesn't seem especially interested in playing or being social. He just gets this laser focus beam on another dog and HAS to meet it. On lead, if I spot the other dog while it's far enough away, I can usually, distract him with treats and lead him in a different direction. When we're surprised, or too close, or I don't have high-enough value treats on me I resort to simply literally dragging him past or away from the other dog far more often than I'd like to admit. And nevermind just encountering other dogs when we're walking, he completely loses his head and is unable to work in their presence anywhere. Any kind of group classes are out of the question for us. (Even if there aren't other dogs around, I have a very hard time getting him to focus and work anywhere outside of our yard - but that's a story for another post.) I really want to do something about this - I could manage things as they are, but it really limits where we can go and what we can do training-wise and we occasionally encounter people at off-leash areas who are put out that I can't prevent my dog approaching theirs (I need to rant about this, too - we live in an area of leash laws and it's an OFF-LEASH DOG AREA for goodness sake! If your dog is aggressive or reactive or has no recall and needs to be on a lead or you just want to walk your dog on a lead and not have him be bothered by off-leash dogs you can walk, literally, ANYWHERE outside of this few square kms!) I've dabbled with LAT intermittently with little success but now I'm resigned to the fact that we need to start from a very long-distance starting point and work very gradually closer to other dogs. I can see that it's going to take a long time. Please let me know that it'll be worth putting in the time and effort!
My dog is like this - so I understand just how hard it is. My boy, who I got at 7 months, used to spend his whole walk scanning the environment looking for other dogs then bolting. He would lunge, whine and bark on the lead if he saw a dog 50m away! He so much better now, at 3 years, and I can trust him off lead - he's only run off 3 times in the last 8 months, which for us is really good/ I think there are a few things I've done which have helped Lucky to improve, including LAT. 1. Management - for months I walked him with a long line, so if there was a dog in the distance I could stop him from running off by stepping on the line before he noticed the other dog. It's annoying using a long line, you have to watch your dog all the time, to get to the line before they try to run off - it's dangerous to grab the line after they have started to run. A long line should be attached to a non-tightening harness, not a collar, for safety. I used a 5m line most of the time. 2. Play games and keep your dog close to you - there are lots of threads on the forum about keeping your dog engaged on walks. Play games, reward for paying attention to you, be unpredictable by changing direction. I try to keep Lucky within 10m of me most of the time. Make sure he knows it's fun to be with you! 3. Calm interaction with other dogs - go for walks with calm dogs that don't like to play. This helped a lot, just walking together, sniffing things, and being relaxed helped Lucky learn that other dogs are often boring. 4. LAT - I play LAT every time he sees another dog. I started with tubes of liver pate or fish pate from the pet shop - now usually just kibble is enough. I reward good choices - every time he chooses me over another dog, or comes back to me after interacting with another dog, he gets a food reward and an enthusiastic greeting. I've found it helps if you don't expect much, and then you will be genuinely grateful and enthusiastic when they are calm - they can tell if you are annoyed/frustrated! 5. What to do when they run away... my trainer told us to not go and get him, but just wait for him to some back. I can't do this myself because it's so rude to let your dog bother someone and go get your dog. But, they learn that they get to decide where you go - they run off and you follow them! So, when I get to Lucky, I apologise to the owner, put him on the lead immediately, and walk calmly away without using rewards. I don't let the interaction with the other dog continue. It takes a long time, and I still have days where he is more interested in other dogs than I would like, but on the whole, he is so much better! Yesterday morning we had a really good walk, he chose to come to me instead of greeting other dogs, on lead he checked in with me when he saw other dogs, when we were approaching dogs he walked to heel until I released him to say hello, and he prefers to come back to me after meeting another dog, because he likes interacting with me! So, yes it does get better - but slowly and with a lot of patience!
Hi, If you feel able (and willing!) perhaps you could start an LAT training log for Killah. The Training Logs section of the forum is here: https://thelabradorforum.com/forums/your-training-logs.21/ That way, you could document your progress and maybe help others by having a central resource on LAT. What do you say?
Good idea, @UncleBob! The thing with LAT is that you really have to commit to it. There's a lot of management involved, and, if you go into it half-heartedly, you're not going to see brilliant results. But it does work, if you put the time and effort in. Sometimes a lot more quickly than you'd expect! In my experience, using LAT for an overly-enthusiastic dog works a lot faster than for a scared dog.
That's a great idea. I'm currently training it with Cassie, and am beginning to see her look to me of her own accord. Not out of the woods yet though! @cannuckKim, I agree with @lucky-dog, all the things about keeping them closer on walks, I think all these things work together to keep the focus. Cassie is very much like Killah, around other dogs so I'm working hard too!
Not silly at all. I might not be the best person to explain this, but in a nut shell: Once your dog has seen a trigger (say another dog), you click and wait for him to turn towards you for a treat. You don't move closer towards the trigger (dog in this instance). If he does not turn his head towards you after the click, you are to close. So reset and move further back. You do this for about 5 repetition, same distance. The object of this ga.e is for the dog to turn automatically towards you when he sees the trigger. The click and treat. Once you have mastered that you move a step closer, and repeat step 1. This poster shows it better. I can say that it has worked for us, but agrre if you are going to do it you have to commit to it. She just found everydog exciting from a long distance. We now finally can walk past one dog (unless it is a lab), but workiing on multiple dogs.
I'm not a trainer but have used LAT very successfully for a dog scared of children and another scared of traffic. I'm just wondering whether these dogs who are obsessed by other dogs have enough opportunities to socialise with them?
Maybe sometimes. I think it can also be the opposite, that they are dogs that have had too much wild play with other dogs. But also their personalities - my boy is very confident far away from me, he is really focused on his environment, loves to chase, and his absolute favourite thing is meeting new people or dogs.
I think this is an interesting point, one that I think a lot about with Cassie. She sees other dogs on a regular basis, but doesn't socialise as such, for various reasons such as safety. I started a training class a couple of months back, which is good, because I wanted her behaviour around others dogs to improve. The dogs are allowed free play before and after, which to start with I thought was great, but I now feel that actually she now is worse for wanting to play with all dogs, where as before she was more accepting that she couldn't always.
The problem with us was she has had to much off lead socialisation in the early days. So now she just thinks everydog wants to say hello. This is where I feel the LAT is very handy...plus age I think
Thank you for all the thoughts and encouragement! I keep up with the forum on my phone so haven't been ignoring everyone - I'm just not frequently in front of a keyboard to easily reply. I've started re-reading Control Unleashed to get a better handle on how to implement LAT (and the other techniques advised to build engagement and reduce reactivity). Without a specific class or access to helpers to create set-ups, we're going to have to rely on using LAT in appropriate situations as they present themselves. But I know this is all just de-sensitisation and counter-conditioning. I wish I could work out *why* he's so interested in other dogs - and it's just the initial meeting; he rarely wants to play with or even hang around with the other dog (sweet-smelling bitches being the exception!). He'll do the mutual sniffing and maybe run a bit to and fro, but then he'll move on and do his own thing. He'll always recall away from a dog *after* they've met, but not a chance on his way to them. Is it anxiety that causes him to want to check out other dogs? "It's okay, mum, I checked it out and that dog's not going to be a problem." Sex-driven (he's intact)? "Hey, maybe that's a bitch who's up for mating!... Nah, nevermind." - maybe, but he was maddeningly like this even as a tiny pup, before sexual maturity. Like others above, I thought lots of socialisation with dogs in his early days would help, but it just left him over-aroused. At the puppy class he started at 9 weeks old, he would just strain and bark and yowl at the of his lead while the other puppies (and not so-puppies) sat and looked bemused when they weren't paying rapt attention to their owners - well, that's what it felt like, anyways. It was embarrassing and the instructor offered me tips for dealing with his barking - but he didn't bark at home or behave like that anywhere else! Her solution in class was to have me sit with my foot on his lead, holding it so short that he was prevented from getting up from lying down - that just turned him into a Tasmanian devil until he gave up and shut down for a few minutes to gather his strength to whip up another frenzy. I'm convinced that this poisoned his down for a long, long time and even now he'll grumble when I ask him to settle (had to find an alternative to the "down" cue which started to just wind him up). And once she brought an air horn to class which startled him into silence for about three seconds. There was free-play at the end of class, but now I see that the lack of structure in that play wasn't at all helpful. After a couple of weeks, I arranged with another participant (who, ironically, was looking for help with her dog's barking problem that caused noise complaints from her neighbours, while he didn't bark at all during class!) to arrive a bit early to let our dogs play and "get it out of their systems" before class started but that made things worse. Where we walk off-lead most often, using a long-line isn't practical as it's alongside a river and there are lots of places where he can easily access the water and have a swim. When I can, I do put him on-lead when I see another dog on-lead in the distance, but this annoys me no end - this is our off-lead decompression walk time and what do people expect when they come to an area where there are signs at every entrance to the trail that say "Off-leash dog area. Expect to encounter dogs running free." To be fair, there have only been four or five times in the two years we've been going there that people have been funny about other dogs approaching theirs. Most are laissez-faire or even actively seek opportunities for their dogs to socialise on the trail. There are a couple of dogs that we regularly meet up with there and Killah's always happy to just mooch along and sniff and swim with another dog. And if there's another dog around as competition, he's always up for a game of fetch, which isn't always the case when we're alone (despite the fact that he'll *always* play fetch enthusiastically at home.) But this doesn't stop him having to go check out every other dog we come across (and to be fair, some days we can walk for up to two hours and see no one else). He has one doggy friend - a female yellow lab a couple of months younger - who occasionally comes over for play dates and who I've taken in to look after for up to a week at a time while her owners have been away, and they play wrestle-chase and bitey-face enthusiastically almost non-stop. In a dog park setting, he'll occasionally find another doggy friend to spend time playing with, but most often he'll quickly get bored after checking out every other dog and rather go off sniffing and peeing on his own or want to play fetch which is especially exciting because there's space to use the Chuck-It ball launcher! We don't go to the dog park anymore, though. It was boring for me, and although mindless ball-chasing tires him out, I now try not to do much of that preferring to get him engaged in training games keeping no-rules fetch in store as a valuable and exciting reward. Well, that's just a long-winded explanation for my conclusion that spending more time with other dogs is probably not the solution. Where a long-line would be helpful, I think, is at a larger park (leash laws here, so we should be able to control our distance from any other dogs) where I could let him sniff around within the length of the line, reward him for voluntarily checking in with me, and play Look at That when another dog is in sight. I need to let him check out our space adequately before I can expect him to begin paying attention to me, and then let him learn that LAT is a fun game that we play whenever other dogs appear. Phew - just getting this all out in writing makes it seem so obvious and really helps me logically think through specifically what I need to do. I think a training log is a good idea - it's just a matter of making the time to write. But this long post has been very useful and motivating so watch this space.
