Look At Me, Dammit!

I’ve titled this one “Look at me, dammit” because that’s what every owner who ever took a puppy or a dog to a training school said multiple times whilst waving a treat around in front of the dog’s face frustrated that the dog is doing everything but paying attention to them. It’s also something I see so many frustrated dog owners saying as their dog is paying attention to everything else around them except the food being shoved in front of their face as a distraction.

I am going to take a harsh tone in this one because this topic annoys me. If you’re wanting or expecting rainbows and unicorns, jog on. If you want to understand why the things we’ve been told to do to train our dogs are the opposite of what we should be doing, and don’t mind some good old fashioned mudslinging, read on.

My particular mood with respect to this one is because I got conned. I fell for the absolute garbage that passes for dog training, and wondered why my dogs weren’t affectionate, and why they didn’t trust me and why Tora was reactive. I failed to critically examine what I was being told, I failed to think for myself, and just did what I was told, by alleged experts. I found out the hard way that doubling down on a bad idea makes things worse. When I reflect on that, years later, I’m still angry and it is why you’ll probably have heard me saying, on more than one occasion, dog training needs to die in a ditch. It does.

Let’s get into it.

Here are some statements that I would expect you’ve come across before from dog training schools you’ve attended, books you’ve read, trainers you’ve hired, and online (big name) trainers you’ve watched: Attention. Focus. Teaching your dog to look at you. The dog should adopt eye contact without cue or command.

I’ll use some illustrations to make my points as I go, visuals are always helpful in this regard.

Why do we want our dogs to look at us? There are a number of reasons; far too many to list, but they all boil down to this: so we can communicate with them. I will say eye contact with your dog is a good thing. What is more important is the reason that your dog does or does not look at you.

So why am I railing against dog training and its insistence that our dogs look at us on demand having said that eye contact is a good thing? Because the demand for attention on command coming from the humans is an attempt at shortcutting to get something that occurs naturally when you have a solid relationship based on mutual trust and respect with the dog.

The way that the “art of attention” or focus is generally taught relies on manipulation and bribery with treats, and / or punishment of some description to achieve it. The animal is not given the choice of looking at you because it wants to, or because you are valuable to the dog, it’s because they have to. Taking the lead from the dog sports world (IGP in particular) which is where the “look at me, dammit” idea comes from originally; I suspect you’re familiar with the concept of “heeling” or walking with the dog to heel, here’s a picture just in case you aren’t:

IGP Style Heel Walking

This is how dogs in IGP have to walk next to their handlers. The dog is essentially unable to look where it’s going, its undivided focus has to be on the handler the whole time, or points get deducted. It can’t even walk properly when heeling. This dog is being trained for IGP dog sports. This is not a pet dog. It’s not really a dog anymore either. It’s a tool. It has been manipulated and forced into this behaviour with various aversive methods and food lures, so that it will do what the human wants, when the human wants, first time, every time, on command. There is no room for the dog to use its brain to do anything other than what the human wants. If it did, it would be punished.

Michael Ellis and Ivan Balabanov have shared some of their methods on how this is done if you’re prepared to sit through lots of YouTube videos and podcasts. I’ll save you the hassle:

“I want to help them [the dog] grasp what I’m trying to teach them which doesn’t necessarily mean force right off the bat, its setting up obsession so that the dog makes the connection that you want them to make quickly.”

“If we did to people what we are doing to dogs, which is essentially creating OCD, there’d be an outcry and the sport would be banned immediately”.

Note the word “obsession” in the first quote, and the frank admission of what IGP is, in the second. Even worse, the insinuation is that if the training regime doesn’t set up obsession in the dog, force will be brought in to get what the human wants out of the dog. Remember a few paragraphs ago I said the dog in the picture wasn’t a dog, it’s a tool. That is exactly what IGP does to dogs, and the people at the top of the tree in the sport know exactly what it’s doing to the dogs. The Belgian Sheperd (Malanois) in the picture was bred to herd farm animals. Have you ever watched farm animal herding being done by working dogs? I highly recommend it. How much looking at the human do they do? Almost none at all. Too busy watching the farm animals and listening for commands. So why the demand for attention from the animal in IGP? It is purely self-aggrandisement by the humans. And its fake. Totally fake. The dog didn’t get a choice to be like that. This is where the demand for looking at the owner comes from. It has transferred from IGP.

So let’s ask ourselves why. Why has this type of training moved into the pet dog world? If you don’t think it has, here’s a photo of a random dog training class, for pet dogs taken from the internet. This particular manoeuvre the owner (and trainer) is doing, is the early stages of working towards that heel walking picture above. There’s food in the owner’s hand – bribery. The owners are trying to “buy” their dogs attention and focus with treats. Why are they doing this?

This type of bribing the dog to look at them exists for one reason only. The dog doesn’t want to look at them. Of course it doesn’t. Usually, this exercise is done in a room full of strange dogs and people, in this case, it’s outside in a field, no doubt full of interesting smells and sounds. What do you think is more important to the dog; working out if you’re surrounded by friends of foes in a room full of predatory canines and humans, or, looking at the owner? The same applies equally in a field full of fun stuff. What is more important to the dog? The fun other dogs, people and things, or looking at the owner?

Time for a little fun: Would you be able to go into a room full of strange people and dogs, and just stare into the eyes of your partner that brought you there on command? No, no you wouldn’t. That would be stressful. You’d feel unsafe. Especially if it’s a room full of the big breeds, how about more than 10 mastiff and molosser guardians like Rottweiler’s and Caucasian Shepherds in a small room? Let’s up the ante; add in collars and leashes, oh and food, and yes, you can get yanked around and shouted at for not looking at your partner on demand. You are in a room full of huge unknown apex predators, dogs and people, and you’re not allowed to satisfy your instincts which are screaming at you that you might not be safe. You have stay by your owner and not interact with the dogs and people in the room, and you have to look at your owner on demand when they want you to, even when moving around the environment near the massive dogs. You can’t leave either. How would you feel? Would that be a confidence and trust building exercise for you? No, it’d scare the life out of you, and you’d feel like you were totally out of control, and potentially in serious danger. That would put you under enormous stress, and you’d be running hot on cortisol and adrenaline, you’d want to be out of there the whole time. Would bits of chocolate or steak help you calm down and look at your partner on demand, or would the yanking and cranking on the leash, or even a shock with an e-collar? Does that even make sense?

Hopefully that paints you a little picture of exactly how bonkers the whole concept of “look at me, dammit” is.

The one way to succeed in the scenarios above is when you already have complete and total trust in your partner – but that can only be built before you end up in such pressure situations, it can’t be built in those situations, they are too stressful.

So back to the earlier question, why would you take a sentient animal, the dog, and put it into an environment that is chock full of things that are interesting, or scary, to it, that’s any environment really, and then demand via bribery (food) or physical punishment, that the dog ignores the things that are scary or interesting to it, in order to just look at you?

The answer is twofold: because you are scared of what the dog might do, and, because you aren’t someone the dog wants to look at. You are not sufficiently important in the dog’s life to warrant looking at. The environment is more important, irrespective of whether it is exciting or scary. The whole concept of “look at me, dammit” is an attempt at cheating to get control of the dog without being valued or trusted by the dog, it is a pale imitation of a strong relationship, a mirage of something that isn’t really there, but looks good. It is a transactional and desperate attempt to get what you want from the dog without putting in the hard work of building a relationship based on mutual trust and respect.

When you’ve built a relationship based on mutual trust and respect, the dog will actively look at you at regular intervals because it wants to, because it trusts you, because it has a mutually respectful relationship with you where you are important to the dog because you are you – but you won’t have demanded its attention in difficult situations in the first place, because you trust your dog to handle situations sensibly and to lean on you when they are struggling. That’s why your dog values you and will look at you without demanding it.

“Look at me, dammit”, is at its core, control. Look at that IGP picture again, look at the dog training school picture. That is all about control. There is zero room for the dog to be a sentient animal and become familiar with its surroundings. Here’s another good example:

Here is a dog trainer so confident in their dog’s ability to handle a situation that when they spot another dog, which is off leash, that hasn’t even noticed them yet (it will, don’t worry) the trainer immediately demands their dog’s attention. Why? Why is her dog not allowed to notice the other dog? Why is a sentient pack animal not allowed to notice another one of its kind? Because the trainer / owner is scared. Scared of the potential outcomes. Turns out this particular trainer has a fear aggressive dog. This is sadly the natural progression of any mammal that is prevented from being able to interact with its environment, if it can’t interact, it can’t rationalise, when a mammal cannot rationalise the environment, it is being prevented from making decisions and learning from the consequences of those decisions, and then it doesn’t know how to handle situations, and that is when things go wrong, and this is the result:

The trainer / owner begins desperately trying to fend off the other dog whilst controlling their dog because the human knows the outcome of the dogs meeting won’t be a good one, but what they sadly don’t know is that this happens because that is what they have built by using the “look at me, dammit” philosophy. This is the logical outcome of that philosophy, how this is not more widely understood by animal experts is beyond me.

This dog has been subjected to this treatment all its life, it doesn’t know how to rationalise, all it knows is “look at me, dammit” and it can read the anxiety in the human, which imprints on the dog really well and really fast when the dog is not allowed to interact with the environment and situations it finds itself in. Then you get a dog that feels the need to lash out because it doesn’t know what else to do. How is this not obvious?

Here’s a great example of what I’ve been talking about:

This picture had the caption “The only way to do dog parks”. This is mental. In what world does this make any sense at all?

This is about the most awful thing you can do to a dog. This is opposite of what you should be doing to have a calm well balanced well behaved dog. This is all about control. There is no relationship. There is no trust. This owner is not allowing the dog any space to think, to rationalise, to process the situation. They are trying to control everything. This makes reactive dogs. This makes dogs that don’t’ trust. This is manipulation and bribery. This is an abomination. This is not how you work through anxiety or fear. This is not how you calm over excitement. This is how you make anxious, nervous, distrustful reactive dogs that get scared and bite.

Dogs learn the same way we do. By the consequences of their actions. Operant Conditioning. The foundation to that is they have to be given the space to do the actions from which they can learn. It has to be understood from the dog’s point of view, not your point of view on behalf of the dog because you want it to do something for you. That is not operant conditioning at all. Operant conditioning cannot happen with the human controlling everything. If this is you, or you were told to do this type of thing to your dog, stop it. Stop it now.

I think it is time for some positivity and light at the end of the tunnel:

Let me show you the real “look at me”. I will share some pictures of my dog, Rollo, out with me at the dog beach a couple of weeks ago. In these pictures I have not called Rollo or done anything to attract his attention. My dog is looking at me without me calling him, because he wants to, you can go to my YouTube channel and watch for yourself with the sound on.

Here's the link: https://youtu.be/NHTvfpa4_JA?si=dl2IW72Lyjjc-JYj

I have not called him. Rollo looks at me because I am worth looking at (I am good looking, obviously, so of course he likes looking at me.) I am important to him because we have a relationship built on mutual trust and respect. He is surrounded by people and dogs in these pictures, granted they are out of shot in two of them, but if you watch the video, you’ll see them all. This is a high distraction area.

Rollo’s looking right at me. Because he wants to. He’s met the dog that has gone past him in the photo above. No drama. Why? Because he’s been allowed to meet thousands of dogs, and to learn how to do that in an appropriate manner, via other dogs. He got taught how to dog, by other dogs. I don’t therefore need to demand his attention, I don’t need to try and control him, so I’m not. I’ve given him the space to be a dog. I have offered him trust and respect, and guess what I get back. Trust and respect. Those things are earned. If you don’t have them, you haven’t earnt them. Demanding your dog look at you in difficult situations is no way to go about earning them either. It is the very opposite.

Here’s another example;

Same deal. I’ve said nothing.

Oh and another

One more just to drive the point home, remember, I am not calling Rollo, I am not demanding anything from him at all, all this is his choice, you can verify that yourself by watching the video.

This is what a relationship based on mutual trust and respect brings you. My dog cares where I am and what I’m doing, not because I’m bribing him to, and not because I’m forcing him to via punishment. Looking at me is his choice, he does it because he wants to.

Could I walk into a room full of dogs and people just like most dog training classes are and call Rollo and get his undivided attention? No. He’s a Tibetan Mastiff, one of, if not the most, independent minded dogs out there. His job is to check out the environment and make it safe, only a fool would fight those genetics. I could however, walk in there, take off the leash, go sit down and relax whilst he goes and makes friends. He’ll look for me at regular intervals, and he’ll look right at me with a hard look if there’s an issue that he requires my assistance with, and that includes him telling me he’s had enough and would like to leave. That communication channel is open, always.

“Look at me, dammit” as I’ve already alluded to, is a scam. It is control over relationship. It is control over trust. It is the perfect blueprint for creating fearful, anxious, reactive dogs prone to lashing out and biting. Good money if you’re a dog trainer in need of work. A lovely bit of extra business you can drum up by causing the problem. Why on earth would dog training have perfected the blueprint for ruining dogs? Very good question. But it has perfected it, and as a result, it needs to die in a ditch for the damage it has done to innumerable dogs. I was very nearly one of its victims, and for that, I wish to see it dead.

You have my sympathies, if like me, you fell for this scam and were doing really awful things to your dog(s) in the search for a having a great dog. What everyone should be focussing on first is a relationship based on mutual trust and respect. Once you’ve achieved that, then you can go on to train for activities you want to do with your dog, but it won’t be coerced or forced. You’ll even be able to go into difficult environments and your dog will stay with you and will likely be asking you “what are we doing?” by looking at you.

The real deal is out there, you too can have what I have with mine, with yours. All you have to do is step away from “dog training” and start focusing on your relationship.