Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village, and today we’re going to talk about training dogs. So one of the main complaints people have about their dogs is that they don’t come when called. Well first of all, you have to have the right relationship. If you haven’t already, be sure to preview the relationship video before you do any training. Now, rottweilers are lovely dogs…but they have to be paying attention to you about, checking in with you about the appropriateness of their behavior before they’ll ever come. The best time to work on the come is when the dog is a puppy, because they automatically want to follow you everywhere. Well, by the time a puppy is an adolescent—Ursa… as in this case, our little acorn hunter—it’s a lot harder to get them to come. But work on it every day. And remember, set your dog up to succeed; don’t ask her to come if you’re in a crowded park. You’re just setting her up to fail, by setting her up to ignore you. The first step of the recall is…sit…starting in a sit, or in any position when your dog is paying attention. And then it’s helpful to use your body to encourage your dog to come to you. You can start off just six feet away—that’s fine. Here…good girl…good…good…Now, you see that she hesitated, so I started moving backward. I don’t want to tug on the leash, especially on, if she has a flat collar on, because that’s just going to cause her to pull back. So I’ll do it again from the standing position… here… good… Again, I want the treat reinforcement to be random… sit… good… I want to speed her up a little bit now, so I’m going to get a little more excited… here… good girl… very nice… sit… good… Now there, she hesitated when I told her sit, so I just move forward a little bit to help her out… here… good girl… sit… good… Now notice that I used the word “here” instead of “come.” It doesn’t matter which word you use, as long as you’re consistent. At Taurus Training, we use the word “here” because most people have been telling their dogs to come up until the time they bring them in for training. The dog’s been ignoring it repeatedly; so they think “come” means to run away faster. It doesn’t matter which word you choose; it just matters that you’re consistent with rewarding your dog when coming to you.
