Teaching your dog to come when called

The 5 rules of recall:

1. Never call your puppy for anything unpleasant. Such as nail clipping, bathing, or having his leash clipped on to go home from the park. In short, anything that might give him pause the next time you call him. 

2. Never call your puppy if you are not sure he will come. All recalls should be successful recalls. Work at your puppy’s level: If he has a kindergarten-level recall, don’t give him a graduate assignment like being called away from a cat in a tree. 

3. If you call your puppy and he doesn’t come, you must make it happen. Run over to him and put a treat in front of his nose, backing up as you get his attention so he follows you. 

4. Only call once. Resist the urge to call over and over and over. It only teaches your puppy to tune out the command. Call once and, if necessary, use rule 3. Make the recall happen. 

5. Fabulous rewards get fabulous recalls. If you want your puppy to stop whatever interesting puppy thing he is doing and come running to you, make it worth his while. Use extra yummy treats—no dry biscuits here!—or his favourite toy, if that is your puppy’s fancy.

How to train your dog to come when you call

Teaching your dog to come when you call is both easy and challenging. The difficult part is to stick to the five rules above and to prevent your dog from choosing to do something else instead. The world is full of exciting temptations, which naturally distract your dog and make it hard for them to choose to come to you instead.

Susan Garrett advocates a strategic approach to help you shape a more reliable response each and every time you call your dog by introducing distractions systematically. Here is how this goes:

• Make a distraction list. Include situations, people, toys, places, other animals, food, objects or odours that your dog finds distracting, and that may keep him from listening to you.

• Rate the distractions. Group your dog’s distractions into four different categories: “low”, “moderate”, “high” and “over the top”. For the next week, whenever you are around any distractions that are moderate or higher keep your dog on leash. Avoid any “over the top” distractions for at least the next 2 months.

• Choose a new recall word. If you have been using come with only partial success, than it is better to use a new word, it can be come’ere!, here!, quick!, hustle! or any word that you like.
• Schedule your training. Make a plan to do 3 short practice sessions every day. In every recall training session call your dog 15 to 20 times. Each session no longer than 5 minutes.
• Add distractions gradually. In your initial training sessions make sure that they aren’t any distractions. Then gradually add distractions, but be careful, you want your dog to be successful as you want to rehearse great behaviour. Eventually you want to be able to successfully call your dog even in the presence of his “over the top” distractions. But don’t attempt this until you have done at least 8 weeks of recall training. If your dog has had a history of not coming when called, you may want to practice for longer, schedule 4 moths or even 6 months of diligent recall training.

• Mix up your rewards. Use high value rewards, but stay unpredictable. Utilise, treats, your dogs dinner, permission to go for a car ride and different toys. Sometimes stand while you cal, sometimes turn and run to let your dog chase you. Keep it fun!

• Keep score. Every time your dog comes when you call, you get one point. Every time your dog does not come when you call he gets 20 points. You want to always stay well ahead of your dog which means that every time he wins, you need to get 20 successful recalls in to make up for it!

If you find that you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out; contact me or sign up for one of my training programmes.