I'm a fairly experienced dog owner ( have had 8 dogs of my own ) and have always been able to train my dogs to recall.
Even our lurcher would come back unless she was chasing something.
We've had our newest dog ( Husky/Lab) for a year now, and, he was excellent for the first 9 months, but for the last three months he's started buggering off when it suits him. He's not even chasing stuff, just going where his nose takes him, then coming back to check i'm still there but running off when I approach him.
Then after a while you can see him decide to come back and he just approaches me for a pat and a treat. Often other people can catch him for me, and then he comes back to me as good as gold, no pulling away or trying to escape!
He's excellent at recall in our training class ( out in the park) and is doing well in agility ( not competing yet but maybe next year).
Sometimes he does the same for the dog walker- maybe 20-30% of the walks but can go for weeks without being a problem, then suddenly he has the wild in his eyes again. He does always come back eventually but his record is 3 hours of freedom!
We've also tried the whistle, he's fantastic at responding to this at home but when he goes feral he takes no notice of it.
My other dog comes back fine, but this dog isn't influenced by what the other one is doing. They play together quite a lot when running free but our newer one is quite happy going off on his own once our older one is on his lead.
We don't know his history but he was an Irish poundie, and seemed to have never been in a house when he came to the UK. He was a young adult when we got him, but acts like a puppy still.
We have some areas to walk him that are secure if he does decide to not come back, so the plan is to leash him everywhere else and keep working on his recall in training and agility.
Has anyone else had a dog with a dodgy recall that they have managed to correct?
Is it a matter of training and more training?
Or is he never likely to be reliable given that he's somewhere between 2-3 years old.
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The doghouse
Dog with intermittent recall
31 replies
FiveHoursSleep · 12/05/2016 19:48
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