We all dream of the perfect recall. Watching our dog playing with another dog and being able to call them back to us the moment we’re ready to go. Seeing that look in your dog’s eyes when they spot a squirrel and calling them back to you before they take off in a chase. We’ve seen it in movies, we see versions of it on social media, and we think “any dog can do this”. What we don’t see in the movies or on short reels, is the amount of training that goes into a recall that responsive.
It’s easy to bring a dog into your life, have the best of intensions for what you’re going to teach them to do, and to realize one day you didn’t quite get there. The good news is that it’s never too late to improve your recall.
To start rebuilding your recall, you need to start at the basics.
When I talk about recall with my clients, I usually talk about how when we’re training recall, or any skill, we’re essentially building a foundation for a house. Every skill has its own house when we’re done. How well we build our foundation will determine how well that house holds up. We’ll talk more about building that foundation in the next segment of this series. For now, we’re going to focus on the most foundational of the foundation building skills: Attention.
The foundation of responsive training is attention. Attention is something that we need to thoughtfully train. When we’ve trained a solid foundation of attention, we’re more likely to get a dog who responds to our recall cue.
Teaching attention should also include teaching our dog to pay attention to their name. The distinction between the two is that with Name Attention, our dog is prompted to pay attention to us when we say their name. With Attention alone, we’re teaching our dog that it’s rewarding to regularly pay attention to us in all kinds of environments, even without being prompted. Both skills, when trained properly, build a solid foundation which makes the rest of our training, including recall, run more smoothly.
So let’s start with the basics. Let’s start with attention.
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