Total Recall

This is something that so many people struggle with and I was one of those people in my early days of dog ownership.
As people that care abot our dogs we want to make sure that they have as much freedom as we can give them so that they can live their best life. This ironically is where we set ourselves up for failure. Whether we have a newly rehomed dog or a puppy we find ourselves giving away too much freedom too soon and with this the dog finds value everywhere except for with you- the owner.
So lets break it down. The world is a jambori of sights, sounds and smells that a dog is going to find a huge amount of value in. Once that value outweighs you and the small handfull of cheese or kibble you might be holding you’ve lost the dog to the enviroment and the reinforcement that the environment brings.

*An important note here is that even though I’ll be as clear as possible there will always be room for nuance and approching situations acording to the circumstances presented.

So how do you train recall? Well there are a few ways to approch this but firstly I’d be starting in the home. If your dog doesn’t come to you when called in the home then chances are you’ll be shit out of luck when you’re out on a walk. I like to set myself up fr success too, so I’d be making sure my dog was on a house lead. That way I never have to try to chase my dog around the house and I always have a means of controlling my dogs where-abouts within the house. The home should be a fairly easy to place to start this recall journey because you can control your enviroment nicely and making sure that nothing else is competing for your dogs attention.

Now the thing with dog training is that usually to try to solve one problem you must first have certain things in place. With recall I’ll need the dog to understand pressure and how to move with pressure and not against it, however lets just assume for now that you’ve done this step and your dog understands how to move with pressure.
I like to use a flexi lead to train recall because it allows a certain amount of freedom but I ultimately have full control which is vital for if the dog decides to not respond. So, we’re in a field and your dog has some freedom on the flexi, you say ‘Fido, here!’ but the dog decides to continue whatever it is he’s doing, here because we have the flexi we can use some pressure or indeed even reel the dog in