Use the Hide & Seek Game Technique to Teach Your Dog a Reliable Recall

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Elise McMahon for ExpertVillage.com. And, in this video series, we're going to talk about some of the games you can play to teach your dog a reliable recall. And, this game is going to be hide and seek. And, we're going to have Sue demonstrating with her dog, Teddy. And, what we're going to do here is I'm going to distract Teddy with me, while and Sue goes off and she's going to hide behind the table over there. And, when she calls him, she's going to use his name, his recall word, his regular every day recall word, which is "come." And then, she's going to make noise in some way for him to come and find her. The key here is she's not going to repeat his name or the word "come." Because, remember, the third rule was, you never repeat your command. So, the noise you make, you could do a squeaker, if you're not really good at making a lot of noise, or you can just go "baditditiditiditdit." Make some noise the dog can find you. Alright? So, we're going to demonstrate this. Teddy, this way. And, I'm going to just distract Teddy while Sue goes off and hides. So, he doesn't know where she's gone. Now, she's hidden. And, Sue, you can go ahead and call Teddy. Teddy, come. Good boy. And then, you can just... Good. So, good. Good job. So, Teddy gets to go and find his owner. He gets rewarded for doing it. And, it's a really fun game to play with your dog. You want to play really good, fun recall games with your dog because we want to get them out of that history, that habit, that sometimes coming when called is not such a good thing. So we're playing fun games to teach them that coming when called is really good and trying to find your owner is always a good thing. "