Blocking

Overshadowing is one of the most important concepts that you can take away from this course. If you want to teach your dog verbal response without relying on physical cues as to what you want , you will have to practice at this. Most people speak with their hands and it doesn’t come naturally to separate your words from your gestures. Dogs are biased to body language and will always choose to watch it over listening to our voice. Pay special care when you start adding your verbal cues so that they come before you start showing the physical cue of what you want to the dog. Your fastest root to a dog who is verbally responsive is to not overshadow. Remember it is always verbal cue first , followed by physical help closely ,but they should never overlap. Overshadowing can block learning and slow down the process of learning verbal cues greatly. This not only holds true to learning behaviours but conditioning our markers. We will never form a strong association to our marker if the mark doesn’t precede handing the food over to the dog. Think about the watch me command for instance. If I want to teach my dog to look at me and I moved my hand before giving the terminal mark Ok . My dogs eyes will most likely go from watching my face to my hands , and I would have now captured looking at my hand. Due to overshadowing I have now confused what I wanted to teach my dog.