I love Victoria Stillwell's show It's Me or the Dog. The most recent show was about a dog named Peanut Butter that came into a family with a lot of other dogs and cats. Peanut Butter was very high energy and wasn't trained. Victoria basically worked with the owners to walk her and give her activities. She worked with Peanut Butter and the owners to teach her basic training and concentration skills.
But the interesting thing was that they used the "leave it" command almost in the way the woman from the walk (see related story) suggested to me. However, it didn't seem to work too well. Maybe I'm just being stubborn, but bear with me.
They taught the "leave it" command in the usual way and the dog did great. The dog ignored a close up interesting treat or object in return for another interesting treat or object. Perfect.
But then for some reason Victoria was using this for far away objects, or even concepts, the dog was interested in. This brings up a very good question. What exactly does the leave it command mean? Does it mean, don't touch that thing? Does it mean look at me? Does it mean ignore whatever you're currently thinking about? It seems like when the dog did well, the command meant, "Don't touch that thing." But later Victoria tried changing the meaning to, "Ignore whatever you're currently thinking about." But that's a very weird command, and a concept I'm not sure dogs will be entirely successful with, as indicated by what happened on the show.
The best moment came when the Mom was trying to do some exercises without Victoria present. She finally just said sit and held a treat for him to focus on. This is excellent, and it worked much better that "leave it."
Dogs are very good at following commands which have a clear physical meaning and are not conceptual. Drop it. Sit. Down. Stay. They are not so good at commands like: Do anything but sit. Do anything but bark. Don't look over there. Don't worry about whatever you're thinking about.
When the owner gave Peanut Butter a sit command she knew exactly what to do. She didn't interpret sit as, "don't pay attention to that". She interpreted it as sit. And that's a very easy thing to understand and do. It accomplishes "don't pay attention to that" quite nicely but the dog doesn't know that.
On our walk the other day, Kody didn't interpret "right here" as don't bark, but it accomplished that. Progressive trainers will always tell you. When your dog is doing something you don't like, figure out what you want them to do and do that. It just works.