A fundamental skill your dog needs is targeting, or focusing on a particular object. Once you teach a target, you can ask the dog to follow it, pick it up, sit on it, and many other things. Targeting is thus a building block for many different skills and tricks you can teach.
Target vs. lure
Please understand the difference between a lure and a target. A lure is typically a treat or something else the dog likes. A target can be anything from a stick to a newspaper. We often use lures to introduce a concept: Here, Fido, follow this lure / treat—keep your eyes on my hand—and you will get it.
But you can’t rely only on lures to teach skills. If your dog watches your hand only when you’re holding a treat, he hasn’t learned anything yet. He’s following his instinct, but he’s not really paying attention to what you want him to do.
Teaching targeting—or any skill, for that matter—is different from luring. You challenge your dog to think of the desired behavior and then reward him when he gets it. “What do I need to do to get that treat? Ah, I need to follow her hand / go to my rug / pick up the ball!” Now your dog is learning.
Targeting your hand
The first target you want to teach is your hand. You need to teach your dog to follow your hand with his eyes so you can use hand cues as well as verbal ones to tell him what you want.
You could start with a lure if you want, though it’s not really necessary. In that case, you’d start by holding a treat and waving your hand to the side. When your dog follows your hand, release the treat.
Then wave your hand to the side without a treat in it. Have your clicker ready in the other hand. If your dog reacts to your hand to your hand in any way, even just glancing at it, click and treat. If he doesn’t look at first, wave your hand in front of his face so he has to look; then click and treat.
Then hold out longer so that a mere glance doesn’t earn the treat; the dog has to actually focus on your hand to get the click-treat reward. Extend the learning until the dog has to touch your hand in order to earn the treat. Now you’re up to middle school.
Targeting other objects
You can teach your dog to target other objects, such as balls, sticks, newspapers, and many others. (Watch our video that uses targeting to teach a dog to pick up a stick.) In your verbal cues, be sure to use the word for the object so the dog can differentiate the ball from the stick. Dogs can learn a lot of human vocabulary if their humans are careful to teach.
My neighbor is a champ at teaching targeting. His dog learned how to get the newspaper and close open doors with this simple method. At our house, we’ve taught dogs to “get the blanket.”
Another kind of targeting is to teach a place such as the dog’s crate or rug.
