As the weather is warming up people are wanting to head out with their dogs
Take them out to more open spaces with their dogs and enjoy watching them just run around and be themselves fully in their element.
Problem?
Recall hasn’t come easy, it’s hit and miss.
Maybe not at all, you don’t take your dog off leash at all in fear he will completely ignore you.
Then there is the worry about other dogs and how they might behave.
For some dogs recall comes easy, personally every lab cross I have owned required minimal experience and dumb luck in coming back when I was younger.
And you guys have hear about Bundy? Being a cattle dog if a kangaroo, cow or even unfortunately a motorbike came into view I no longer existed and he was off.
Despite what felt like thousand of recall drills and hours of obedience work.
I’ll tell you what it was frustrating to do all the right things and still have things not come together.
But we lacked a layer I had with my other dogs in the past that I didn’t have with him.
I was incredibly connected with them, our communication just worked, it was like we had an unspoken language constantly going on between us it was nice, it was easy.
With Bundy I had worked on training obedience and spent plenty of time doing so together, but neither of is absolutely loved it we both did it because we felt we had to please the other and we were obliged to do the work.
Once training was done any connection formed would sever and we would go back to our usual daily routine of miscommunication around the household.
It didn’t flow, it wasn’t easy, it was like we were constantly speaking another language.
I remember by the 4th year mark as things were so painstakingly slow at coming together for us, yeah we had made progress but it had taken years and a whole lot of work I didn’t love doing.
Why was it so easy with dogs in the past and so hard for him? Why did I hear this so often from other people too? What am I missing.
That’s when the whole communication and connection thing started to surface.
Teaching recall takes layers, it’s not something we even bother with in our 8 week program, one because you guys have usually already started doing all the obedience work.
But most importantly, to get the foundation of a good solid recall you need to have a good solid foundation of communication and connection as your starting point.
Don’t have that you are ALWAYS going to have a dodgy recall .
We work on having dogs instincts work in our favour, when we have a strong social network dog value that, they want everyone to stay a good distance to one another.
They are less likely to run too far away and more likely to check in.
Now that’s not the only layer but god dam do we teach recall so much faster when we have that layer in place.
Recall is one of the most difficult things you can teach your dog, and your dogs difficulty level is going to influence just how difficult that is going to be.
I encourage people to have off leash time with the condition that the recall is good, if you are struggling with it you may need to peel back the layers that have formed that understanding between you both and work out where it’s not quite coming together.
Know it really isn’t a simple straight forward thing to teach.
But having a solid recall down, having to be able to call your dog back away from ANYTHING and happily come back to you, want to come back to you, the safety, reassurance and not to mention stress reducing on outings is priceless.