Teach a Dog the Recall Command

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Elise for ExpertVillage.com and in this short video clip we’re going to be talking about 4 important components to teaching your dog a good recall. Recall is when you’re asking your dog to come to you. One of the first things is that you never want to call your dog to come to you for something that’s unpleasant for the dog. This might be if the dog is outside having fun in the yard and you need to go to work and you call your dog into the house and put him in a crate and go away for 8 hours. For the dog this word come is going to have a negative association. Another thing that you don’t want to do is call your dog when you’re not sure that they’re going to come. So again if your dog is in the yard and it’s chasing a squirrel or sniffing a bush, you don’t want to stand at your back door and call your dog and tell them to come because they will most likely ignore you. In both of these instances what you want to do is go and get your dog. Another thing that’s important to remember is when you call your dog, you’re going to say their name, you’re going to say your recall word and you only ever want to say it one time, if we repeat the command over and over again and the dog remains chasing the squirrel, they’re actually learning to ignore us when we tell them to come. The fourth thing and very important is when the dog does come to us, we want to use very high value food rewards, actually it doesn’t always have to be food if your dog is really keen on a dog, when they come you can throw a ball for them, if they really like nothing better than getting a scratch on the head, then you can do that. most dogs will work pretty well with food rewards though. So we’re going to do an example of this with Tai, let’s go. We’re going to put Tai in a sit and stay. And I’m going to go across the room, when I tell him to come to me, I’m going to click him to mark his behavior, I’m going to praise him, I’m going to reward him. Good boy, what a good puppy. Good job, what a good boy. Good puppy, okay. So the message that Tai got was when he came to me, he actually probably got about 6 or 7 treats there, that was a really good experience for him. I want the experience for the dog when they’re coming to you to be very, very positive because sometimes you might be competing against other things like squirrels, other dogs, children, cars and you need to have the dog think that coming to you is going to be the best thing that could happen. "