Desperately need some help with recall

[DaisySteiner]

I've got a 15 month old Westie/Schnauzer cross who up until the last month or two has been pretty good at recall. Occasionally if he got wet and overexcited at the end of a long walk he would go bonkers and just run around like a mad thing and would tear off in the opposite direction if he thought I wanted to put him on the lead. In the last week things have deteriorated badly and he has run off two or three times, once I really thought he'd gone for good, I couldn't see him anywhere when he suddenly turned up behind me. Then this mornign I spent about 30 minutes trying to catch him in some undergrowth with him totally refusing to come anywhere near me.

I always take treats out with me, I call him back frequently and treat him, but he just seems to get to a stage where he's so overexcited (often seems to coincide with getting wet) that he just ignores me. I can walk off and ignore him and he just doesn't care, he's so engrossed in ferreting around in a ditch.

Aaaaah!! I'm so stressed out and upset by this. I don't think I can let him off the lead at all at the moment, which is a tragedy because he loves his off-lead walks. We've done clicker training in the past which I liked and would happily try again, just not sure how to go about it. Please someone help because I love my little dog, but after this morning's escapade which left me filthy, tired, muddy, behind schedule and with a splitting headache I'm starting to hate him

Also meant to add, we do have an Acme dog whistle which works well inside the house but he just totally ignores it outside

Hi, at 15 months he may be going through adolescence. Mine is just coming out of it at 2 years and also does the crazy thing when he gets wet. Has he been neutered? If not, this MAY help. What treats are you using? Maybe there's something that will motivate him more?

It also sounds like he's really enjoying these chase games with you! What do you do when you do finally catch him? Is it straight back on the lead? If he really loves his walks, he's going to try and keep it going as long as possible. If you stop his off lead walks you may well compound the problem, as he'll soon learn that he has to take every possible opportunity to run off! Do you recall him, reward him, and then let him go again? regular reps of this might help.

I clicker train with mine so happy to explain anything.

Another one here with a bonkers when wet dog.

Daisy I do sypathise, recall I think is a never ending process and something you have to just keep reinforcing over and over again.

I find it easiest to think of recall like a basic sum your dog is doing.

It will be assessing what is MORE fun for me (the dog). So what is more fun, this muddy ditch here or going back to my owner?

Your dog has probably worked out by now that if it comes back to you it might get a treat, and depending on what treats you have that could be a dog pleasure value of 2.

Or it might get put back on the lead.
That is a dog pleasure value of -5.

But if it stays in this ditch here then smelly wet ditches have a dpv of 5 and if it stays away from you it might get chased and ooh that is a dpv of 9 or 10.

To get a good recall you always have to have the potential on or within your person to out dpv whatever your dog may come across.

So treats, yes but they have to be HIGH value treats, not some gopping dried bit of biscuit. Something stinky and luxurious like frankfurters or cheese or dried liver.

Even better than treats though I think is to become Captain Dog Fun yourself. So tuggy toys, tennis balls, we have a Kong Wubba which can be tugged, thrown AND it squeaks. If your dog loves being chased then you can start to train it at home than when it comes back to you will initiate a game of chase.

Hope that makes sense.

With the overexcited bit (this happens a lot with my dog too) I think you need to watch for signs that it is going about to start (with us it is if she has been running with other dogs for more than a couple of minutes), and head it off at the pass if you like.

So try to get a recall in sooner rather than later, lots of rewards for coming back , maybe treats and a game of tug and then on the lead. Let the dog settle on lead for a bit, plus make on lead time fun too with the clicker and treats working on walking on a loose lead, and when you see that the manic look or distraction has passed then you can let him off again.

Oh and welcome Cupcakes just saw your post on the other thread.

You will fit right in here if you are a clicker trainer

One thing we've done with ours (you may have done it anyway) is to put her on the lead lots of times during the walk, not just at the end. When she is on the lead, she gets loads of treats, praise and fun, then after a minute or so, she's let off again. That way going on the lead doesn't signal the end of the walk and something to spoil her fun, just a tasty interlude!

Another thing our dog class taught us to do was at least 50 recalls a day in the house and garden as well. We stand in a triangle, square or round the house (depending on how many of us there are) and call her to each of us randomly. She gets a treat each time for coming. Then we try adding in a distraction from one of us (you can make it a more tempting distraction as you go) and still do the recall game. You may have to up the value of the treats at this point.

We also recall her lots of times in the one walk, (not just when she's doing something she wants to and we don't want her to!) but also when she is pretty near to us and not very interested in much at that point. That way it's easy for her to be successful and get a tasty treat. If I know we are going somewhere very distracting (like by the river where the pheasants roost) I take liver cake because she will always return for that.

Mind you, she's only 10 months so I may have further issues to come! Our puppy class said you can never be proud that you have recall sorted until they are through adolescence!!

Our sheltie has always walked with his nose to our ankles so we never had to teach recall. I used to long for a dog that ran off and had fun on walks.....then we got our little JRTx puppy and I realised that dogs who have fun on walks can be quite a lot of hard work!!

Another thing we were told to do by our class, if it looks like she isn't coming back to us, is to call her excitedly to get her attention, and then run away from her. A dog who enjoys chase will usually find this promised game very tempting and chase you - ours certainly does! when she catches us, we praise her and treat her, and often keep the chase game up for a bit so that catching us isn't the end of her fun.

Ooh, yes - run away! Usually a pretty foolproof way of getting them to come to you.

Thanks Slubber - I am most definately a clicker devotee! We have five at the moment. Mostly because we keep losing them, buying more, then finding them again...

Same here Cupcakes. I believe clickers burrow, and are possibly gifted with teleportation. The number of times I have put on a coat that I was SURE was clicker free and voila! there is one hiding in the depths of a pocket.

Clickers breed, but are very shy.

All my coats seem to have a clicker in the pocket, plus poo bags and treats. Mostly they're dry treats but occasionally I plunge my hand into a pocket and discover some cut up bits of elderly sweaty cheese, which is nice. The other day I found some bacon rind.

Even my dressing gown pocket has treats in it; I stick to dry treats for that though.

Clickers hang on the doors of my bathrooms - as I always have a clicker around my wrist - it would be TMI to say why that gets in the way when I go to the loo suffice to say I take them off and hang then on the door handle but generally forget to pick them up again.

Dressing gowns essential accessories are clickers in the pocket and treats. The best training is always done first thing in the morning in dressing gown and wellies

Best recall advice:- run away squealing

It depends on breed of dog if you need to wave a furry toy(terrier), piece of cheese (lab), tennis ball (collie), anything (staffie), pheasant (spaniel), run into a muddy puddle (goldie) run to another dog (doodle), fall on the floor (boxer). to be continued.........

I don't think I have ever found a clicker in my dressing gown. This is terrible, can't believe I have overlooked bleary eyed stumble out of the back door early morning training opportunities.

LOL @ breed specific incentives

I feel your pain Daisy. Doglet was doing fantastic with his recall and I was so proud of him - until yesterday!

Took him to one of our usual woodland areas and wandered around for half an hour, calling him back and treating him regularly, successfully calling him to me when walking past other dogs...and then I left it a millisecond too late to call him back to me at the end of the walk, he refused to come to me and instead bolted for the main road

Thankfully he was ok but it has totally dented my confidence and I was shaking like a leaf and feeling sick for a good half an hour after we got home. To make matters worse I took him to the nice safe dog park today and he was apparently deaf!!!

Mine doesn't get let off the lead for about a week after I've been to visit my mother. She's got into this dog-granny thing a bit too happily and he comes back a raging ASBO-case.

I've found training him to a whistle to be a great help (I've got a whistle/clicker combined - fabby invention!), although when the bloke at the park blew the whistle for his dogs, and mine saw hot dog sausages were on the menu - he developed perfect recall... for the other guy! Never misses a sausage opportunity that one - and everyone falls for the goofy ears and slobbery beard grinning up hopefully at them!

If all else fails... I rustle the bag of dog treats - that's got him up a vertical quarry face in 2 seconds flat!

The running away thing works - you become a chase game then... and the other one I've heard mention is bowing down, arse in air imitating a dog's playbow... of course in the case of my backside - that in the air would obliterate the sunlight for a small city.

As the owner of a beagle who loves nothing better than to turn a deaf ear to my recall commands, i will let u in on the only thing that has worked with us. always start a walk with your dog on the lead and only let the dog off once it sits calmly. once off the lead, call dog back regularly by calling "X, come!" (note where dog's name is not X, substitute actual name for X ) It is important to use the word "come" as dog is so used to hearing its name in many different scenarios besides recall. when dogs turns to come back to u get very excited - big smile, "good dog!", etc. - give treat and put dog on lead. walk a bit with dog on lead, then repeat - make dog sit calmly, let off lead, call back, get excited, give treat, walk on lead for a bit more. it is important that dog is on lead more than is off lead on a walk, as this teaches that you are in charge and free playtime is a special privilege, not a right! remember to always end the walk on a high note, so if you have trouble at one of the recalls, when dog eventually comes back, give treat, put on lead and keep on lead for rest of walk. do not get to the stage where u are screaming and yelling and dog is ignoring you. this may mean that in the beginning walks are mostly on the lead, but over time you can build up to longer periods off the lead. hope this helps you and you are able to continue enjoying giving your dog time off the lead, which is so important - and, i've now discovered, can be great fun too!

Our one-year-old bolts too. It is sooo annoying and we tried and tried with high value treats, running away, lots of recall practice, games.... Still, the call of the wild was too much. At the moment, he goes out on a long line, about 25m, and much of the time, i'm not holding the end. I think he is learning that running off is less of an option and it's far more satisfactory to play with me and get treats with the other dogs. When he has escaped, he has also come back far quicker than before. We'll keep pracicing and hopefully we'll get there!

Thanks for all your advice and sympathy and I'm so, so sorry that I haven't got back to this thread until now It dropped off my 'threads I'm on' and I only noticed a minute ago that there were replies!

I will read through them all again in a bit, but just to update, I've mostly been keeping him on his lead, and only letting him off in areas where I know from experience he's unlikely to leg it. I've started taking the whistle along with me and a bag of chopped up frankfurters and been doing lots of recall on and off the lead. When I let him off I've also been putting him back on periodically for a minute or two before releasing him again.

I'm also making sure that I only try and recall him using the whistle when I'm pretty confident that he will come back! We've got probably a 99% success rate with this so I'm hoping in time that he will get more and more tuned in to the whistle so that there will be fewer distractions that will make him ignore me!

BTW when he did his deaf-act, I did try running in the opposite direction squealing: he couldn't give a sh*t His big love in life is a tennis ball and until the past couple of months it was our fail-safe recall treat. He got wise to that though and started coming back for the ball, coming so-close and then legging it in the opposite direction with the ball in his mouth. My dog-walking buddy reckons he's far more intelligent than I am

Any opinions on whether neutering would help? Lots of people IRL have suggested it, but I wasn't sure whether it would make any difference. He's a bugger for barking at cats in the garden too, so would be great if it would help with that too!

Thanks again for all the suggestions. xx

Hi Daisy

I've just been going through the same with my lab. I have an amazing new dog trainer and he advised me to have one new toy - something interactive like a ball on a rope - that is MY toy. It only comes on walks and after a few sessions of high energy fun (literally 60 seconds) it's only used when he comes when I call him (and I never let it go). It has literally turned his recall around from 60% reliable to 100% reliable. I'd always carried treats which he didn't really care about, but this toy is a winner.

Good luck!

Thanks TV. Maybe a I should try that with his tennis ball.

I used to throw a ball for my dog and the trainer showed me it was too predictable - again something the dog could "decide" whether it was fun enough to come back for. Keep it really unpredictable - hide it behind your back, pretend to throw it and don't, pass it infront and behind you....let the dog get it at the last minute then it's OVER until next time. It's absolutely changed my walks - I no longer get that horrible tummy sinking moment when I need him to come back and I know he probably won't....

With mine I have to make sure I have lots of back-on-the-lead moments and always vary where that happens

RE neutering I really don't know, mine is a spayed female but she is a hound and once she is on a scent she's very difficult to get back. Oh, and she still barks at cats and foxes in the garden til I stop her.

If you use a clicker don't click and treat until you have your hand on his collar so he learns that the click is for coming back AND letting you hold the collar. This should eliminate the jinking around and running off again business.

In your original post you mention trying to catch him and him not coming anywhere near you. Where you going up to him and then he darted off or had he just legged it out of sight?

If he is ball obsessed I would have two balls. If he bogs off with one just a shrug your shoulders and walk in the opposite direction and completely ignore him. I would at this point start playing with the other ball myself. I bet you he will come up to you if he does send him away - tell him to go away gently push him away - you are having much more fun playing with the ball. When you have got him a bit away from you call him and he will come charging and let him play with the new ball.

If he is refusing to come up to you but jumps around you but does not let him catch him just sit down with your back to him and ignore him. Again I would play with a toy and he will come to see what you are up to.

Recall is one command I never use a clicker for. It is very difficult to click the recall accurately. If you click when he turns to you - you are clicking the turn, if you click when you put his lead on you are clicking him standing still to have the lead put on. You can not click the continual movement of the dog coming to you.

So recall I just make very exciting and you must remember that recall does not mean the end of something to the dog eg end of walk, end of sniff, end of playing with that dog. It must mean the beginning of something more exciting eg a game of chase, a game with the ball, yummy yummy treats etc.

On that occasion he'd legged it out of sight and then when I found him in the ditch he wouldn't come out if I called (or ran away squealing!) and then when I tried to catch him just darted away from me if he saw me (friend had to catch him in the end). I think part of the 'problem' is that he is quite bright - I can get him to come back for something like playing with a ball for a week or two and then he catches on to what I'm up to and starts ignoring it. Because there are particular places on our normal routes where he's a bugger I started putting him on the lead before we got to them - he got smart to that too and would run off earlier and earlier, grrr.

Do you think I should I keep concentrating on the whistle and try and get 100% recall with that or try something else?!

Heartened to hear you don't use a clicker for recall, Minimu. I don't either, simply because, as you said, it's very difficult to pinpoint which part of the recall to click. I've read numerous articles about it and it seems to be one of those things that nobody can agree on. I read somewhere that ideally, it should be the decision to come back that's clicked. Some say the head turn. Some say wait until the dog is back to you. I think what muddies the waters is that the click ends the behaviour - so if, say, you're clicking the dog when he's on his way back, you're actually saying "OK, you can stop coming back now"!

Has anyone suggested teaching a really reliable, emergency "Down" yet?

Very handy, and can work better than recall in some situations, because you're not actually asking the dog to turn AWAY from whatever it's interested in; you're simply asking it to go down. And you can use what they're interested in as a reward, too. For instance, dog goes towards other dog - you shout "down" - dog goes down - you shout "OK" - dog thinks "Great! If I obey a down command, I get to play with another dog!"