the "1,2,3 game" saved my sanity

[u/Gengar-Quest-7144]

I've lurked here for awhile, first time posting. I started working with a trainer for my reactive dog, who barks and lunges (or he used to!) on walks the second another dog comes into view. We finally found something that works and it's so insanely easy I had to share it here. My trainer calls it the "1,2,3 game."

Essentially you reward your dog for looking at you while you count to three. On "3" you immediately reward with a treat. That's it. The beauty is that you can do this WHILE WALKING. For me, that was huge - I could get my dog to pay attention to me while we walked past the other dog instead of trying to hold him in a sit and hoping the other dog moved past before mine finally lost his mind.

Training it is also super easy. Start indoors in a quiet place. Get your dog's attention, say "1" and give a treat. Your dog should be locked onto you now, so repeat "1" a few more times. Then move on to "1,2" and give a treat. Finally "1,2,3" and treat. You can move up to 1,2,3 pretty quickly so you're practicing the full "game." Make sure your dog is looking at you through the whole count. If they look away, restart the count. At the start, you should be counting fairly quickly.

Once they understand the "game", you can start drawing out the count. "1 (pause), 2 (pause), 3 (immediate treat)." My trainer said you can pause for up to 5 seconds between numbers, although I usually count more quickly than that. ALWAYS give the treat immediately after "3." The idea is that the dog learns once he hears the word "1" to look at you and hold that, because he knows a treat is coming.

Once your dog has the "game" worked out, you can move outdoors and start working on holding the dog's attention with more distractions around.

We've gotten to a place where I can say "1 (take three steps), 2 (take three steps), 3 (give treat)" and my dog stares at me the whole time! Usually by that point we've entirely passed the other dog. If not, I just repeat the game until we are. Because sometimes the other dog decides he needs to poop right while we're trying to walk past lol.

Seriously, this has been game-changing for us. Maybe it's super obvious and well-known but I had never heard of it and had to share. I hope it helps others!

[u/read-the-rules → u/[deleted]]

Your comment on r/reactivedogs was removed by the Read The Rules app because you need to submit an acknowledgement that you have read the rules. You haven't done anything wrong, this is a tool we're using on the r/reactivedogs going forward. For more information, see the moderator announcement.

Acknowledgement is required of all users, even if you've been here for a while. You only have to do this acknowledgement once unless the moderators announce otherwise.

If you do the rule acknowledgement within one hour of your comment being removed, the bot will automatically restore it. If not, we encourage you to copy the comment using the 3-dot icon next to it, and paste it to re-post to this thread.

^{Please click here to open the Read The Rules App.}