Recall?

[PoppyDog]

So I've read about people saying that their dog/s have 100% recall. As in they ALWAYS come when called.

Last Summer we took Poppy to the dog beach a few times and we never let her off the leash even though it was an "off leash" area. She was only 4 - 5 months old and we didn't feel comfortable. I was scared she wouldn't come back when called.

Since then we have been working on recall at home and I was thinking today that she now ALWAYS comes when called!

When I go out the front to check the mail, sometimes she comes with me. The front of our house isn't fenced and I always watch her like a hawk and she always stays close. If she strays to close to the road I call her back to me and she ALWAYS comes back. Our road is VERY quiet so please don't think I'm playing with fire...I'm really not!

With the weather warming up again we will probably be taking her back to the beach. I'm just not sure that she would be 100% with her recall in a public place like that, with LOTS of other doggies and people. But then how do I know unless I try!?

Any advice on how to tackle this issue?

[PoppyDog]

*Shameless Self Bump*

[Staranais]

We don't have a 100% recall yet. My last dog was 99.9% but my current dog is a work in progress!

Having said that, the people I know who have struggled with recall before & who now claim 100% (or 99.9%) recall use one of the following systems:

* Drive training (Steve from K9 Pro has a very good distance learning program about this)

* E collar (get advice from someone knowledgeable, K9 Pro is again a great resource)

* Really reliable recall system (I think Corvus is using this to very good effect - apologies if I've singled you out incorrectly Corvus)

There are probably other ways to get a very reliable recall on problem dogs, but these are the 3 options I know about. I used drive training to get an excellent recall on my first dog. But that relied on his personality - he lived to bite things. It would not work so well on some other dogs. My current dog, I'm using a combo of drive training & e collar. I haven't tried RRR, but have watched the DVD, I have some reservations about the method but can't really comment with any knowledge since I haven't tried it, and apparently some people find it very useful.

Hopefully other posters can help you more.

[raineth]

well I take it that the method you're using works quite well, because she is recalling out the front of your house

Sounds to me like you just might need to slowly build her up with distractions?

Like Staranais said, the more rewarding it for her to recall, the more likely she will be to do it.

let us know how you go

[corvus]

That's right, Staranais, we have used RRR with pretty good success. If you ignore last weekend's adventure into the swamp next to our dog park, which involved Kivi randomly deciding to cross the swamp after 2 years of avoiding getting his feet muddy in it. He fell into a channel and got out on the wrong side. When he was recalled he got as far as the channel and lost momentum.

The beauty of dogs is that they do things like that. Well, spitz breeds do. They can walk past a distraction a hundred times and then one day for apparently no real reason they act completely out of character and succumb to it.

With Kivi's recall training, we made some bad judgement calls a few times and recalled him around distractions he wasn't ready for yet when his recall wasn't adequately conditioned. It set us back a few months. It's not always easy to tell whether they will come back or not in that training phase. I would say the safest bet is to work them up. Try it on a quiet playing field, at the park when it's quiet, then pick ever more distracting scenarios to try it. You can keep them on a long line to boost your confidence if it helps. Start with smaller distances and work up to bigger distances, but when you go to a more distracting place, go back to smaller distances again. With the RRR method, what you are ultimately looking for is your dog whipping their head around and starting to move towards you as soon as you call. The idea is they don't get as far as thinking about whether to come or not. Hopefully they come at a run, because that way they will usually blow through obstacles that might otherwise distract them.

For Erik I have a list of distracting things and places in order from least distracting to most distracting. It's worth noting that an environment that is highly distracting all on its own (e.g., for us, the vacant lot across the road that the dogs would like to thoroughly explore but never get the chance) can be more distracting than an easy environment with a usually hard distraction, like a playing field with a game of football going on.