00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host Tony Peterson. In today's episode is all about understanding your dog's attention span and how to use that knowledge to curate a good training strategy. This is a pretty relevant topic today, literally for all of us, because we're in a world that is just constantly trying to grab our attention. More than that later in this podcast, but for now, maybe that will help us empathize with our dogs a little bit and help us try to understand how to work with our pupps to keep them as focused as possible while helping them learn new task during training. This is one of those things that we deal with all the time when it comes to our dogs, but we often don't really consider it. So pay attention because I'm going to cover it right now. You might vaguely remember a study that came out back in twenty fifteen about human attention spans and how they are dwindling. The story, which appeared in USA Today, The Guardian and even The New York Times, came out of a study conducted by Microsoft Canada. The conclusion of the study was that our average attention spans went from twelve seconds in two thousand to just eight seconds in twenty thirteen. Now, eight seconds isn't a very long time unless you're on the back of a bowl that really doesn't want you on his back. But that's a highly preventable situation that involves mostly not getting involved in bull riding. Now, losing four seconds of average attention span in less than a decade and a half might seem alarming, but what made the story so compelling was that it compared that eight second attention span we have to the average goldfish, which can pay attention to one thing four well nine seconds. Now, I happen to have some goldfish in my house because my daughters asked me three years ago if they could try to win a fish at the county fair in northern Minnesota. Now, I generally have a rule against imprisoning any creatures for our viewing pleasure, and I'm pretty resolute on that, But I was distracted when they called, and I didn't think they'd win, And to be honest, I knew the state of the fair that they were at, so I figured even if they did win, we'd be having a goldfish funeral within a couple of weeks. But Darwin is a survivor, and I don't know if I've ever met a healthier or more robust fish than him. He was raised on the streets, so I guess our tank is like a luxury apartment for him. I don't know, But what I do know is that it would take someone a lot smarter than me to figure out what his attention span max is out at. He just mostly goldfishes his way through life and doesn't seem particularly interested in much other than food and sometimes harassing his tank mates. Now, if you do some research on that study that showed goldfish would make better students than us, and I don't know why you would, but if you did, you'd see that it has been debunked as mostly kind of junk science. If you try to find studies on canines and their attention span, you can find a fee, but they leave a lot of questions unanswered, like the goldfish one. Now, one study though, that was conducted at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, dug into this topic with the help of one hundred and forty five border collies that were all aged between six months and fourteen years. The dogs were tested how long they could focus on a certain object, which in this case was a like toy plastic watering can. But they also conducted a person test with an individual who was known to the dog. They didn't come up with anything in you know, as cool and marketable as goldfish possessing better attention spans than people, But they did figure out that younger dogs seem to be more trainable than older dogs attention span wise, which is good news for anyone rock at a pupster right now. It's also not that surprising, you know, the whole old dog's New tricks type thing and all that jazz. Now you might also think, well, what good is a study of only border collies since they are supposed to be the MENSA members of the dog world? Fair point, This is purely anecdotal on my part. But I've been lucky enough to watch a few people who are really good with colleies and sheep do their thing, and I can tell you that I don't know if I've ever seen working dogs focus harder on task at hand than border collies when they're supposed to push some sheep in a certain direction. And that includes all of the hunting dogs I've been around in my life. But you know, what. That's not entirely true. There are plenty of pointers out there who can really find their lane when it comes to focusing on something. And I do have two retrievers in my house that can muster up quite a bit of focus when it comes to anything that can be thrown and that could be brought back to me to be thrown again and again and again. But that's selective memory stuff leaking out of my brain too. I just spent some time with that little King Charles Spaniel I'm helping train, and he reminds me a lot of my kids and myself and quite a few people I know, and that he can focus for a little while on something, but there are many many things that will immediately grab his attention and then he's off on another journey. It's frustrating because he's doing really well place training and paying attention or walking nicely along on a check cord, you know when he's asked to heal. But then someone will pull up in the parking lot and you know they'll get out with a dog or not, and he'll lose his shit, or a bird will fly within one hundred and fifty yards of us and catch his attention. And well, he'll lose his shit. Since he's a rescue on his third home in his first year of life, I cut him some slack. But I also don't have a choice. He has to work in small, bite sized chunks of training because he can't stay with me long enough to do even three or four minutes a good training in a row. Usually, if another person or another dog, or really anything pulls him out of training mode, he needs to be redirected or it's just going to spiral. Does that sound familiar. It's not an uncommon issue with young dogs, which is ironic because they are highly trainable. But you have to work with them on their mental schedule and not. That's not to say they should lead the charge completely because then you've given them control of the training and they will not how do I put this? Uh, take it seriously. So there has to be a balance, and that starts with just figuring out what you're working with. There are no hard and fast rules about this stuff, you know, like German short hairs can focus for this long, but springers can only focus for this long or whatever. It doesn't work that way. Instead, a good rule, or at least a general rule to consider is what most you know dog trainers will tell you. It's kind of universal advice from them, which is that sessions should be really short with young dogs and grow as the dog ages. But that's sort of vague as well, So think about it this way. You might have an eight week old puppy that you want to sit on command, not an uncommon scenario, but that eight week old puppy doesn't care about you at all, at least until you have some food tucked into your fist. Now, with the help of some calories, you might get it to sniff your hand and sit while you, you know, give it a gentle push on its butt so it hits the ground. But that whole thing will only last a few seconds. If you can do that three times in a row, that's a win. That's it. But that doesn't mean you can't also hold the pup back and tell it to stay for a second or two when you feed it. In the same day that you do a little bit of that treat training for the sick come in. Overall, you might put in a whopping one or two minutes of actual training on any given day with a puff that young but that's a huge win if you do that for a week straight. That's a puppy that will learn and better yet will learn to learn, which is one of the keys to helping a dog develop a better attention span. Overall, this also helps you be more attentive as a trainer, which matters way more than a lot of us probably think. When you can read a dog and realize that it's likely to drift into unproductive mental territory soon, you can either redirect it with a new and interesting task, give it a little break to out, or call the session before it gets into dangerous territory so you can pick up when the dog is fresh. This should be something that's relatable to all of us, honestly. I recently had a conversation with Reva, who edits this podcast and who often tells me interesting theories about extraterrestrial life, where she mentioned she was just mentally fried on a particular day and that she was done working because of it. That led me to explain to her that I have a mental block in my head that allows me to write about six thousand words on any given day, but when I hit that mark, I generally sputter out. I can sometimes go do something else, like play a little guitar or ahead of the gym and reset myself. But overall, there's something to that level of output that drains my brain for the day. It's just all it can handle. I'm sure you don't have to strain too hard to think about something in your life like that, most likely something work related. Now, if we acknowledge that about ourselves, it's not so difficult to understand why your one year old Brittany or wire hair you can only handle so many training drills before the wheels start to fall off, and yet those same dogs the next day can do the same drills with enthusiasm for roughly the same amount of time or maybe in a little bit more time before once again the wheels will fall off. So the key is to meet your dog where he's at attention span wise and follow these guidelines. Try not to push it to the point where you've gone past what he can handle, because that's generally unproductive for him and you and can make future training sessions less productive. Literally will make your dog not want to work for you. It's also important to learn where the line is and bump up close to it, but still stay shy of it. You don't want to cross it. This way, you can condition your dog to focus better over the long haul. Now, whether that takes some of the the redirection I just mentioned, or a change of scenery, or do whatever you need to do, you can keep this thing going. Now, this also gets easier the more your dog trains, because you know, maybe you work on one skill for a few minutes, but then there's something else he's learning, so you can pivot to that and change things up a little bit and get a few minutes out of that task. Now. I know it's kind of cliched, but that's how training works. It's brick by brick by slow, slow brick over a long time until you have something to show for it. Some days you add several, some days it's only a couple. But over time you're going to cumulatively get somewhere with it. And at the very least, if you keep up with it, you will have always this strong foundation upon which to work. Now, this is intuitive, not groundbreaking stuff, but we often gloss over it in order to train on the schedule that we want to train on while also indulging in a trade and awful lot of us have, which is impatience. And I get it. My friends. I'm someone who can sit dark to dark in a turkey blind or a deer stand and not go totally crazy. But I also lose my freaking mind if someone is five minutes late and I have to stand around and wait for them. So here is where the attention span thing takes a turn in a different direction. That scare tactic study that said we are worse than goldfish at paying attention, well, the reason they framed it up the way they did is because they wanted to connect the research to the widespread addiction we all have to our phones and now, at least more specifically, you know, to TikTok videos and Instagram reels and NonStop engagement content that gives us tiny bits of entertainment while we watch people set off fireworks in their hands, you know, or fall off moving boats or uh, some of the more robust members of society, as they find out they don't have the upper body strength to properly use a rope, swing over a river whatever. We are moving in a direction that isn't conducive to focusing better. Overall, what does all of us being addicted to our phones have to do with dog training? Well, a lot think about it this way. When you tell your lab to heal and then stay, and then you toss a bumper out with the idea that you'll work on steadiness and hand signals and retrieving the hand all in the same little drill. But then your neighbor who always gives your dogs treats, steps out of his garage and he's fourteen bush lights deep, and he starts to hula hoop in the driveway. Your dog might break or just lose track of the task at hand. That sucks, and it's frustrating because we know that the arc of that training session has just changed for the worse. We know that because we know and can see it in real time with our dogs. Now look at it the other way. Your neighbor doesn't pull any hula hoop related shenanigans. And you send your dog out for that retrieve, and in the time it takes to sprint out there and grab the bumper and bring it back, you take out your phone to see what's new on the gram. Your dog runs back, looks at you, You stare at a little rectangle in your hand, and he knows damn well that you've checked out, so he drops the bumper at your feet, looks up at you, and why wouldn't he He knows that you're not paying attention, and since you're not holding him accountable to his actions by doing him the courtesy of watching him all the way through the retrieve, he's going to test you to see what he can get away with. And in that moment, just a tiny moment of distraction on your part, you've put yourself in a lose lose situation with that behavior. If it's important to you that your dog retrieves to hand, which it should be, he's now not done that because of something you did. Hopefully he's well trained enough to be told to pick it up and heal and then delivered a hand. But if you're not there yet, you have a choice to make. Do you pick it up and reward him with another throw, or do you pick it up and break off the session so he doesn't get the reward of another retrieve, even though the punishment you're doling out was in some ways facilitated by your own behavior. In this way, we have to manage our own attention spans with our dogs. And I'll take that a step further. I know you can't always pay attention to your dog. But think about the times when your dog has gotten into trouble. You know, maybe she snuck off and rolled around in a dead skunk carcass, or maybe you gave her a little too much freedom at the barbecue and she figured out how to eat fifteen chicken wings, bones and all while you were wondering if Reva was right about the aliens, and you stared a bit too long at the sky. Whatever the reason, it really doesn't matter. It's about working with our dogs to learn about their attention span, not as a snapshot in life, but as an evolving feature of them that affects so many different aspects of our relationships with them. And it's also about helping them to increase their attention span, which helps us to help them learn more about the behaviors we want out of them. This is long game stuff, like everything else, I mean really everything else when it comes to developing a good duck dog or an upland dog, or just a dog that won't be an absolute nightmare in the house and your guests come over. But it doesn't end there. And this is the point I want to drive home again, because it's really important if you're going to ask your dog to focus on a task that will help him be a better pet and hunting companion. He at least deserves your full attention, even though you might not be able to compete with the average County Fair goldfish when it comes to focus. Try to stay off of TikTok or Reddit during your training sessions and show your dog that you're committed to the process, at least as much as you want him to be, because if you're not, he'll figure it out and use that against you, because that's just their nature. Now, as a last note on this, I'll say you might not realize this is happening, but dogs losing their focus as a primary driver behind us losing our desire to train them. It's snowballs if you're not careful. And often it's a matter of them either being asked to do too much in a given session, which I've talked about on this podcast a lot, or it's a matter of them being bored by their environment or the ask. If they only ever get to do twenty yard retrieves in the backyard, they might appear to lose their attention quickly. But that same dog that gets to work in four or five different environments and any given week might seem like a focus machine. That's often all it takes, and it is an important distinction. So think about that. If you can keep your mental faculties pointed in the right direction for just long enough, and think about coming back in two weeks, because I'm going to talk about how to get your sporting dog as much bird exposure this season as you possibly can. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been The Houndation's podcast. I want to thank you so much for listening and for all your support. I truly appreciate it. We all here at media to truly appreciate it. Without you guys showing up for us, we have nothing, so thank you for that. Now, if you want some more dog training content, or maybe you want some more films, maybe you want to listen to a podcast on a road trip, you're going to take this some of the family. Whatever the mediator dot com has you covered. We literally drop new recipes, new articles, new podcasts, new films every single day. There's something popping up on that site, so go check it out. Thanks again,