Hi, my name is Nancy Cusick, and I'm a professional dog trainer in Austin, Texas. You can visit my website at trainmydogs.com. Today, we're going to talk to you about how to teach your dog to come when called. One thing about coming when called is that you really want to find something that's non-emotional. So, I'm going to load a sound for Mazzie here, who's offering me all kinds of tricks right now, and I'm going to load her a sound. So, the way you load a sound with your puppy is you have them sitting right in front of you. You can use their dog foods. You can use yummy treats. Remember that if you're under high distraction and maybe you're outside at the park like we are today, you can use something higher motivating. So, I'm going to pay you more money to come when I call you than when we're at home. So, at home we can use dog food. Outside you'll probably want to use something a little bit tastier. Okay, so I'm going to load the sound hoo hoo and every time I do that sound, I'm going to hand Mazzie a treat. Hoo hoo, hoo hoo. I can do a variety of different ways to teach her to come when I call her, and you can use a variety of different sounds. If you can whistle, that's probably the best thing. My whistle isn't that great. So, I use hoo hoo, and I can shoot that pretty far. So, if it's noisy, busy, they're playing with other dogs, they can probably here it pretty well. Now, if you're dealing with distraction like playing with other dogs, you might want to make sure that it's going to work before you start repeating that sound. You don't want to become background noise. One of the best ways to load this is to do it at home, and then start at a park that doesn't really have a lot of high distraction. Hoo hoo, I dropped some food. Let's try that again. Hoo hoo, good girl. Hoo hoo. So, that's the simple part of loading. Once you're getting the sound loaded, then I want you to start playing games with your dog. So we can do things like throw a toy, and I'm going to fake Mazzie out with a throw. Once I fake her out, I'm going to make my sound to let her know to turn around. Good girl. The reward in this case is playing with the toy. One of my favorite games to play at home to teach your dog to find you and to locate you is hide and seek. It's the best way to get your dog to know where you are at all times. So, when you're playing hide and seek, if you have another person, you can have one person hold your dog, you go hide somewhere, and let's start making it easy at first, just go behind a door something and then once you do, you make your sound, hoo hoo. Your dog runs and finds you, they get a handful of food. It's a fun game to play. It teaches your dog to find you, instead of you looking everywhere going where is my puppy. So, loading sounds, keeping it non-emotional is one of the best ways to teach your dog to come when called. You can also do things like load her name, Mazzie, and then she would get rewarded, good girl. The value of the name is important. If you use words like come, good, good girl. Come, good. And a dog's favorite game, in the whole wide world, is chase. Make sure you play it a lot with your dog. If they look up at you, and you see that they've noticed that you've called them, take off running, see if they chase you. Nine times out of ten, they probably will.
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