LIFESTYLE NEWS - Teaching a dog to come when called is often more challenging than it seems.

George-based animal behaviourist George van Huyssteen gives a simple way to do it.  

1. Start in a place with no distractions, such as your backyard or inside your house. If your backyard is fully fenced, you can do this off-leash.

2. Call your dog randomly throughout the day. When your dog approaches you, give lots of praise and high-value treats immediately.

3. If there are two of you, both can take part in calling the dog between you. Give lots of encouragement and keep the atmosphere happy and cheerful.

4. Do multiple short training sessions throughout the day and wait until your dog is eager and happy to approach you before moving on to the next step.

5. Ensure your dog is set up for success by making sure he will respond to you. It's pointless to call him away when he is busy chasing a bird or digging after a mole if his recall is not reliable yet.

6. Once your dog finds it very rewarding to approach you, practice in a different safe environment. Use a leash in a new environment, but if it's safe, you can practice off-leash as well.

7. Once your dog is reliable in different areas, start gradually adding distractions. You can set up different situations to practice this, such as asking a friend to help or having a friend with a social dog join you.

8. As the dog becomes more reliable, gradually add more and more distractions, but do not go too fast too soon. This will take time.

9. After many sessions and repetitions, start testing your dog’s recall while distracted. To keep him safe, you can use a long line, for example, a 5m one. If there's any chance of a bad experience in a specific place, go somewhere else to practice instead.

By this stage, dogs like border collies, German Shepherds, retrievers, or, let me say, herding dogs should be responding well to coming when called, but some dogs might need more encouragement and practice. 

Dogs like beagles and scent hounds were bred to follow a scent, so should they find an interesting scent, that is what they will follow. The reason for this is simple. Herding dogs were selectively bred to assist farmers, so they are very good at following instructions. 

Beagles, on the other hand, were bred to be independent and to follow scent, so it might take longer to teach a beagle to come when called than a border collie, for instance. 

I am not saying they cannot be taught to come when called at all, I am saying it might take longer with a bit more patience from their owners.

So, up to now, it seems straightforward, but there are reasons why a recall might fail or why a dog might not become reliable at all. 

So let us do some fault finding:

1. When training a dog, it's common for the cue to lose its meaning. When training a cue, we use classical conditioning or associative learning, which is the basis of clicker training. In clicker training, we first need to condition the dog to the clicker, so classical conditioning is necessary. 

We pair something the dog doesn’t know (an unconditioned stimulus) with something the dog loves, usually food. This makes the sound of the clicker a predictor of food. After conditioning, the dog learns that the 'click' sound means food. Therefore, in dog training, each click should be followed by a reward, typically food. 

Failing to do this devalues the clicker, causing the dog to stop responding to it. People might then think that clicker training doesn't work when, in reality, the clicker has been devalued. 

Similarly, when we repeatedly use a cue with no response from the dog, the cue loses its meaning, and it seems like the dog is “naughty” or “stubborn” when, in fact, the cue is no longer understood by the dog. 

So, if you call your dog and he doesn't respond, avoid continuously repeating the cue. Instead, try something else to get his attention, like clapping your hands or running in the opposite direction. If a dog doesn’t respond to one or two calls, it's unlikely that he will respond after 10 attempts.

2. Inconsistency is one of the primary reasons a recall might fail. For a recall to be reliable, the dog should always find it rewarding to approach you. Let's consider an example: You come home from work and relax with a glass of wine. 

Someone walks past your property, and your dog runs to the fence and starts barking. Even though you've trained the recall, this time, your dog is over-aroused and doesn't respond immediately. 

After calling and getting angry with him, he approaches you, but now you are angry and punish the dog by putting him in a crate or worse. By losing your temper, what did the dog learn? Simply put, he might have learned that it's not always safe to approach you, and your recall might become unreliable. 

When you think about it, your dog barked, then returned to you, and then got punished. So, essentially, he got punished for approaching you.

3. Remember this: Recalls may fail if every recall ends in a negative consequence each time. For instance, if you take your dog to the beach and he has a lot of fun, but every time you call him, it is to leave for home. By doing this often, he may learn that coming to you ends his fun, and your once solid recall might start to fail. 

To avoid this, you can recall your dog, put on his leash or put him in the car, and then allow him to go and play again after a few seconds. If you repeat this process six times and only take him home on the seventh recall, the overall experience ratio of seven to one will be positive for the dog. 

Similarly, dogs that only go for a drive when going to the vet might develop a negative association with car rides. 

In contrast, dogs that go for drives to different areas with no negative consequence will not have the same reaction.

The key point is that teaching a dog to come when called is usually simple. However, it's also easy to unintentionally teach the dog that it's not always safe to come to you, which can make its response unreliable. This is the very basics of teaching a recall, and where things can go wrong.

Article by George van Huyssteen (DipCABT, C.C.A.B, CABTi, MHERA qualified)

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