Why did it get hard?
When we bring a puppy home, we become our puppy’s world. We are the one who keeps them safe, feeds them, plays with them. We show them what’s expected, we help them grow confidence. It’s a magical time and as they grow, we usually find that they are VERY willing to recall for us. The thing is, recall should be easy with a puppy. Between eight weeks and six to seven months, recall is generally easy. Not to say it requires no training, but you are usually the most important factor for your dog during that time and they have not developed the bravery to tolerate the idea of losing sight of you.
Once your puppy transitions into a teenager though, things start to get a bit more rough. Hormones start to change a lot. The brain develops and your dog is suddenly sniffing more intensely, hyper-focusing on other dogs, and their recall starts to get a lot slower. You’re no longer as interesting as you once were with some distractions and their confidence grows.
It’s not that your dog doesn’t love you, but now you need to work harder to motivate your dog to leave the other distractions that are now far more valuable.
This is where a lot of recall training falls apart. We start to have slips in our recall and we just tell ourselves it will get better. We call them more, we get frustrated, but nothing bad happens and so we let it go. What we aren’t usually doing here is training the recall more. We tell ourselves the dog is choosing to ignore us, it’s not a matter of training but their attitude.
It’s the wrong reflex. We should be training more. In dog training, we have a concept of “fluency”. A skill is considered fluent for a dog when they can perform it in all types of environments and with all types of distractions. The thing is we can repeat our recall in the backyard a thousand times, but it won’t help our dog understand that when we yell “Fido come!” in the middle of the trail while they’re exploring, that it means the same thing as the back yard.
Last post, I introduced the concept of building little foundations for every skill we teach. Every time we train a skill, like recall, we are placing a brick in our foundation. How strong that brick is depends on how successful we were. If our dog fails the recall because we tried to do it in an environment they aren’t ready for, we just put a lesser-quality brick in our foundation. If you’re struggling today with recall in your adult dog, your foundation may have some bad bricks or maybe just not enough of them. The good news is you can rebuild and replace those bad bricks with proper training.
Starting to train recall deliberately can make a huge difference. In the last post we started with the basics of attention work. Now it’s time to bring some of that attention work into more of a recall context and work on some check-in behaviour. This typically works best with a long-line attached to a harness and starting with low distraction environments. It’s also a good idea to start keeping track of your dog’s distractions. What are the toughest distractions for them? Other dogs? Birds? Deer? Etc. Make a list but don’t try to recall with those yet. For now, just check-in behaviour is what you’re working to add.
If you’d like to have access to the exercises included in this series, subscribe to the newsletter below. The link for the exercises will be shared for every part of the series.
Stoked Dogs 