Teaching focus is fundamental in dog training. Sometimes we need our dogs to focus on us, which is quite easy to achieve with calling them. But in some cases we want them to focus away from us. We want a dog who is focused on obstacles and understands it’s task.
Something we teach our puppies is focusing on toys (or food). We teach them not to stare at us, but focusing on an object.
Use science
So why not help ourselves with evolution? There has been behavior studies on communication between humans and dogs. For example pointing somewhere when we want the others attention going there. Tests with chimpanzees & humans and dogs & humans show that chimps don’t understand what we want to tell with pointing somewhere, but dogs do. Their attention goes to where we point. It’s really interesting that dogs can read this sign, since they can’t communicate in this way with each other. I guess that’s the reason why showing with our arms where to go is so natural for our dogs. We can adapt this behavior for tricky starts too. We teached our dogs to focus where we point on command, so if the dog should start away from us we can help us with the focus command.
