The attention heel, what and why?

Ginger teaching Baker to heel in 2005. Photos by Jennifer Riess.

On March 7 and 8 the Columbia MO Kennel Club will hold its annual show at the Boone County Fairgrounds. Traditionally, this show has always had a large Obedience entry, and some of the top Obedience competitors in the Midwest and the U.S. will probably attend.

Some of the most common comments we hear about the top competition obedience teams have to do with what we call the attention heel. "Why do they do that odd thing with their heads?" "Why are they watching you all the time?" Indeed, in almost all top obedience teams, the dog will heel on the handler's left side looking straight up at the handler. They don't look where they're going, the don't look down or out, they look up. Some people call this the "pretzel heel," or just plain weird. To a lot of people it seems stupid. "I wouldn't want my dog to do that, he'd fall in a hole and break a leg!" "My dog is of a breed that's supposed to be alert to his surroundings. No way should he be staring up like that." "Those must be robot dogs."

But there's a real and valid reason for the attention heel, and that's why you see it so often in Obedience. It helps to first understand that Obedience is a sport, and like many sports there are some aspects of it that have only vague connections to real life. In real life, you're not likely to have to run full speed then throw yourself down on your belly or back to slide into a small object on the ground, but if you're on a baseball team you need to learn that skill. Being able to bounce a black and white ball off your head and not only that, get it to go a specific direction is quite useful in soccer. In your living room, not so much.

In Obedience, dogs may not need an attention heel for a walk around the park, and most handlers teach a separate skill called Loose Leash Walking (LLW) for those casual times. Yet even outside the obedience ring an attention heel can be useful, especially when moving through crowded areas.

Which comes to the "why" of the attention heel. The reason why we use the attention heel in competition obedience (and in Rally) is because when the dog is focused entirely on you, the human, it's a lot easier for them to react instantly to turns and speed variations. So their performance is more precise. Obedience is a game of precision. Further, when a dog's attention is focused entirely on you, her focus is NOT on that kid dropping an ice cream cone right outside the ring, or that dog of the breed she irrationally hates, or the birds above or the ground squirrels below. And believe it or not, most dogs really like the attention heel because your attention is also focused 100% on them. It's a two-way communication, a dance of subtlety.

We teach the attention heel in many different ways. The photo above is of Ginger and Baker, taken 3 years ago, and she uses food to teach the attention heel. In the horribly unflattering photo below, I'm using a toy (riot stick) with Viva. I'm holding it on my left shoulder with my right hand. With Zipper, because he's very small, I will not teach him to focus on my face but my hand. I'm doing that by teaching him to target a small stick held in my hand and follow it with his nose (a game he loves so much that at the moment he spends more time boinging up and down than going forward).



So if you come to the fairgrounds in a couple of weeks (and we hope you do), watch the Obedience and look at those top teams. See how the dog and handler move as one, with the dog always in the exact right place. And enjoy watching that attention heel.

—Robin