Train your dog to come for a better relationship

Training Your Dog To Come When You Call

Training your dog to come when you call is one of the best gifts you can share with him. A dog with a reliable recall gets to enjoy time off-leash. He gets to have more fun than a dog that has to be leashed all the time. He also gets to enjoy a more connected relationship with his humans.  But it’s not just all about fun and better connection with their humans. They also enjoy a better quality of life, being safer from hazards like getting lost or hit by a vehicle. 

You can teach your dog to come most reliably if you start training before 18 weeks. Starting after that just means you will have to put more time and effort into training to get reliable results because your dog has probably been repeatedly reinforced for not coming when you call. Wait. What? It’s not like you reinforce your dog on purpose for not running to you when you call.

The truth is, from your dog’s perspective, the world is full of places to see, scents to investigate, other dogs, and stinky things to roll in or eat. All of these things reward your dog for not coming when you call! And behaviour that gets rewarded is reinforced. That means it will happen more. So now when you call your dog to come, he is cued to go find something nice to reward himself with instead of running to you. No matter how good your treats are, it’s hard to compete with those environmental reinforcers.

Essentials To Getting Your Dog To Come Running Reliably

Fortunately, all is not lost just because you didn’t practice reinforced recalls enough when your dog was a puppy. Maybe you didn’t even meet your dog until he was an adult. Teaching a puppy to come when he’s called is probably the most important thing you can teach him. However, if you have an older dog, you’ll need to 100% prevent him from taking off when you call.  Being off leash is something that should only happen after the dog finds you more reinforcing than the environment.

That means always using a leash or long line out on walks. You read that right. No off leash walks until you’ve practiced and practiced rocket recall training games starting indoors and when he’s really good at it, then trying it on a 30 foot long line outdoors. You don’t want to do any more practice of the behaviour of finding an environmental reinforcer when you call.

No getting mad at your dog for not coming when you call either. It won’t make him any more likely to come to you next time. Especially when the world is such a wonderful place and you can get so cranky. It all boils down to this: If your dog gets away from you and you had to spend time you didn’t have catching him, it’s your own fault. You’re the one who let him off leash before he was trained in a world full of his favourite things.

Planning, Prevention and Rewarded Repetitions

A reliable and fast recall is built over time. It happens after many heavily reinforced repetitions of the recall cue in different environments and levels of distraction. You need to go into training a reliable with a goal. You also need a plan and it always has to be fun. For the dog and for you too! However, being off leash is something that should only happen after the dog finds you more reinforcing than the environment.

A dog with a reliable recall gets to enjoy time off-leash. He gets to have more fun than a dog that has to be leashed all the time. He also gets to enjoy a more connected relationship with his humans.  But it’s not just all about fun and better connection with their humans. They also enjoy a better quality of life, being safer from hazards like getting lost or hit by a vehicle.  

train your dog to come at an early age

Any puppy trained to come running on cue during the critical social imprinting age (up to about 18 weeks) will remember this behavior into adulthood.  We always train the recall at this early age through fun and games. That way the puppy will always associate coming to us with good times. He’ll want nothing better than to run to us whenever we call him. 

Puppies who get used to ignoring the recall at this age will need to have recall work trained through a sometimes lengthy training program as they get older. So it is important to start building reinforced, repeated positive associations with coming when called at an early age. 

Watch this video and learn what you need to do to train your dog to come using a proven system that uses fun dog training games to teach your dog to come through many reinforced repetitions, even when there are distractions.