Hi! Not sure if this is the right place to post this so please remove if it's not!
Anyway, here's the issue...
We live on a dairy farm and have 4 dogs - an english staffy, 2 border collies, and a 3 year old border x rough collie (Tilly) who we adopted a few months ago...
Tilly was great for the first month, gets along with our other dogs no problems, is a great working dog but is also happy to laze around inside or play with the kids.
A month in though, after having no issues at all with recall or her running off, she started digging holes under the fence and taking off into the bush after wallabies. Doesn't matter if she sees a wallaby while she's still in the yard or not - she knows they're out there somewhere :/ We filled in all the holes, put rocks along the entire fence line, did everything we could to stop her from being able to go under the fence - so she started going over it We rent and did ask if we could alter the fence to make it higher or even install a whole new one, but were told no...
The previous owners apparently took her hunting a lot - although we weren't told this until after we decided to call them and see if she ever did this to them, and what they did to stop it. She apparently never did, but I guess she didn't need to :/
Each time she goes she stays away for hours - the first time was the longest where she was gone for 9 hours with me terrified the entire time that something had happened to her and she wouldn't be coming back. We visited every neighbour within a 10km radius to ask if they'd seen her and to ask them to contact us if they did, we followed her trail through the bush but no matter where we went we couldn't find her. Eventually she just made her own way home...
Anyway - she now spends most of her time either inside or at work (where so far she hasn't run off), the second you put her outside at home though she's gone and it doesn't matter if you see her do it and call her back, she doesn't even look :/ She's just gone and there's nothing you can do except wait for her to come back. We still look for her every time, but we haven't had any more luck than we did the first time - sometimes you hear her barking in the distance but again it doesn't matter how much you call her, she doesn't come. If we do catch up to her she won't come over to us, just takes off again. We have found some of her 'kills' before - she doesn't eat them though, she just kills them and takes off after the next one :/
Other than on these occasions though, she's fantastic with recall - comes every time! :/ I just don't understand it and I'm at my wits end. Other than moving to somewhere with a higher fence I have no idea what to do!
Generally for taking her outside to the toilet or to the car to go to work she is kept on the lead so she can't escape, but every time the kids open the front door (she doesn't do it when it's me or my partner - just the kids) she's there trying to squeeze through and sometimes she manages to get out and she's gone before anyone can even comprehend that she's out...
What we're doing is kind of working (other than her squeezing through the door but that is happening less and less now that I've stopped the kids from opening the door themselves most of the time), but I still feel bad for her that she is stuck inside so much while the other dogs get to play outside as much as they like :/
Basically I'm just wondering if anyone has any advice on how to train her to stop doing this? Other than when she's taking off she really couldn't be more of a perfect dog and I just don't know what to do to stop this one issue, or if there is even anything we can do :/