You lured your dog today. So did I. Probably a few dozen times, if we’re counting.
I know “luring” has become a bit of a dirty word in some corners of dog training, so let’s be really clear about what it actually means. Luring is using something your dog wants — food, a toy, your hand, your body, your motion — as an ANTECEDENT. Something that happens BEFORE the behavior, to produce the movement you’re after.
Now think about the last sequence or course you ran with your dog.
You rotated your shoulders and your dog turned. You decelerated and your dog slowed down and turned. You put your arm out and your dog came to your hand. You ran a line and your dog took the obstacles on it, because your motion — your BODY — told them where to go.
That’s luring, start to finish. A front cross is a lure. A rear cross is a lure. You are luring, at speed, in sequence, on dirt or turf or grass or whatever, with a dog who is hopefully thrilled about it.
And this is where agility is different from just about anything else you could be training:
In agility, we never fade ourselves out as a lure.
Your body isn’t a temporary crutch on the way to something better. Your body IS the cue system. You might layer verbal discrimination skills on TOP of that, but your physical cues are the foundation. You will still be using your body as a lure at Nationals. You’ll still be using it on the World Championship floor. Nobody has ever stood at the line and said “okay, but can he do it if I stand completely still?”
So when people say luring is a shortcut that creates a dog who can’t work without the prompt — in our sport, the prompt never goes away. That’s not a bug we’re tolerating. That’s the entire game. And if it ever DID become a thing, I’d lose interest in the sport, because being physically involved with my dog is most of the joy of it.
Now, I want to be fair here, because there ARE some valid concerns underneath the worry about luring, and I don’t want to minimize those. But those concerns don’t mean ‘luring bad, never lure’.
Lure dependence CAN be a real thing. If you teach a 2on2off with a cookie in your hand and the cookie never leaves your hand, you’ve got a dog who does 2on2off when there’s a cookie. That’s a genuine training failure.
The fix isn’t avoiding lures. It’s being deliberate about them — not labeling luring as bad and then removing yourself further and further from any physical involvement with your dog.
And here’s what I didn’t have for years, that would have made all of this easier: a solid reinforcement structure built on multiple verbal reward markers. I teach it in KNOW Games over at theagilitychallenge.com, but I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole here.
Think about what that cookie in your hand is actually doing. It’s doing multiple jobs at once. It’s guiding your dog — that’s the luring part. But it’s ALSO the thing telling your dog they got it right. The food IS the information. Which means your dog has to be able to SEE it to know anything at all.
That’s why the cookie can’t leave your hand. Not because luring is bad. Because your hand is carrying the whole conversation by itself.
A verbal marker system splits those jobs apart. Once your dog understands a marker — once a word means “yes, THAT, the thing you just did” — the food doesn’t have to be visible anymore. The reinforcement starts in their EAR, the second they hear that well-conditioned marker. And THEN the food can come from your pocket. From the ground. From a toy you throw twenty feet the other way. Two full seconds later, or more.
Which means your hand is free to just guide. And once your hand is only guiding, you can make it smaller, and then start taking it away — and your dog doesn’t lose anything, because the information was never in your hand to begin with.
So here’s what being deliberate actually looks like:
Condition the verbal marker on its own first, away from whatever it is you’re luring. It’s its own skill.
Lure a few reps, not fifty. Three to five, and then get the food out of your hand.
Keep the motion, lose the food. Same hand, same path, empty. Mark the moment your dog gets it right, and pay from your pocket. Then make the motion smaller. Then smaller again.
Pay from somewhere other than the guiding hand. Pocket, ground, thrown toy — so your dog isn’t standing there staring at the hand that’s doing the guiding.
Put the cue on before the prompt is gone, so the word starts predicting the movement rather than the hand.
That’s the actual skill. Not “never lure.” It’s “know what’s a prompt, know what’s a cue, and know which one you want the dog answering.”
But having said all that — your body is STILL a lure on an agility course, and why would you WANT to fade that? You want to REFINE it. Get better at knowing what your body does, how it moves, what you’re telegraphing. Not what you INTENDED to communicate, but how what you actually DID gets interpreted by your dog, and what their response is.
How do I know my own body well enough to use it as an instrument of communication with my dog? That question is one of the things that keeps this sport endlessly interesting to me.
Which is why I get itchy when a whole category of technique gets ruled out on principle, in every context, for every dog, forever. That’s not a training principle at that point. That’s a purity rule.
And here’s my honest problem with purity rules: somebody always pays for them, and it usually isn’t us.
I keep running into people who got a real result doing something perfectly reasonable, and then felt terrible about it afterwards — because somewhere along the line they’d been told that people who do that thing, whether it’s luring or a certain tool or a certain method, are lazy, or unkind, or didn’t try hard enough.
Meanwhile the dog who needed the help is still stuck. And the handler is learning to distrust their own eyes — shaming themselves preemptively, before whoever planted that belief even gets a chance to. That person might not even be around anymore to name or blame. They don’t have to be. We humans are SO good at carrying those beliefs around to berate ourselves with. It’s just wild.
You guys, I’ve been that person. I’ve spent plenty of time being quietly embarrassed about things that worked, because they went against the popular narrative of the day.
So here’s my question for you this week — and I really do want to know, because I don’t want to just be shouting into the void: what’s something you were told not to do, that you did anyway, and it worked?
Leave me a comment and tell me about it. Long or short, doesn’t matter, and I promise I’m not going to judge a single one of them 🙂
Alright. Go forth and lure your dog. You were going to anyway — you’ve done it before, you didn’t die, and neither did your dog. It’s gonna be ok, I promise.
The whole system lives inside The Agility Challenge. If you want the training that goes with this, the door is here.