This is an I-Heart podcast.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Foundations podcast.

I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about understanding your dog's

attention span and how to use that knowledge to curate a good training strategy.

This is a pretty relevant topic today,

literally for all of us, because we're in a world that is just constantly trying to grab our attention. More than that later in this podcast, but for now, maybe that will help us

empathize with our dogs a little bit and help us try to understand how to work with our pups to keep them as focused as possible while helping them learn new tasks during training.

This is one of those things that we deal with all the time when it comes to our dogs, but we often don't really consider it.

So pay attention because I'm going to cover it right now.

You might vaguely remember a study that came out back in 2015 about human attention

spans and how they are dwindling.

The story, which appeared in USA Today, the Guardian and even the New York Times, came out

of a study conducted by Microsoft Canada.

The conclusion of the study was that our average attention spans went from 12 seconds in 2000

to just 8 seconds in 2013. Now, 8 seconds isn't a very long time unless you're on the back

of a bowl that really doesn't want you on his back.

But that's a highly preventable situation that involves mostly not getting involved in bull riding.

Now, losing four seconds of average attention span in less than a decade and a half might seem alarming.

But what made this story so compelling was that it compared that eight second attention span we have to the average

goldfish, which can pay attention to one thing for, well, nine seconds. Now, I happen to have some

goldfish in my house because my daughter's asked me three years ago if they could try to win a

fish at the county fair in northern Minnesota. Now, I generally have a rule against imprisoning

...