I am taking Ted back to basics on recall thanks to his new passion for absconding in the park. Entirely my own fault for cutting corners in his early training. Just one query though. On exercise one, where the dog is offered a plate of juicy warm meat accompanied by a few pips on the whistle - when the exercise is repeated later in the day, is it exactly the same as the first time? That is, do I waft the meat under his nose, or do I summon him by whistle from another room?
In the early stages of recall training, you never test your whistle/cue. What you are doing is pairing the cue with something amazing, not rewarding him for a behaviour. So if you are going back to step one, it's about pairing. If your dog already understands the cue in the house, you could skip ahead to the exercises where you are giving your cue in a context where you are 100% confident your dog will respond.
Agree with @snowbunny. Pairing a cue with something really high value is really quite simple. The easiest way to train a recall to whistle is in the house, then the garden. You can set up for success really easily whilst building a strong reinforcement history. An example is you put pups food bowl down...they naturally race towards you, gently blow your recall then. They start to pair "coming towards you quickly" with "really, really good things". You are capturing the behaviour you want. It is a very simple step for them to associate the whistle with "coming towards you quickly". I still do this now, in the house, garden, playing sausage ping pong to really sharpen that quick response to the whistle.
Thanks very much for the helpful comments. I am taking it very slowly with Ted, unlike when I first short-cutted my way to problems. He is now almost 2 and has learned to self-reward by foraging in the woods, or hassling anglers for their bait. For the first three days I am literally just hand feeding him juicy, not-too-hot roast chicken (roasted in a chicken brick to avoid added fat). He cannot believe his luck. He gets three short pips on the whistle as he starts eating. This gets repeated twice more in the day, and his regular kibble feed is reduced drastically (by two-thirds) to compensate. Next step, our big back garden. I'll report back...
Well so far, all is going well with Ted (and my) remedial recall training. He now responds rapidly to the three short pips, even from the bottom of the garden. He's quite funny to watch, really, because he always has one eye on whatever I am doing in case I reach for the whistle! Sometimes he just stands and stares intently at me for ages, like a needy girlfriend I once had. We're still taking it slowly and are still to move on to recall from sleep and from food. The lesson for all new owners - don't miss out any element from the recall training, like I did. You will pay the price - like I did.
Haha yes, I know just what you mean! Any roast chicken about and Cass is sure we're doing recall training and watches my every move! Pleased to hear it's going well.
Thought I'd update on progress on recall. Much much better. 98% of the time he hurtles towards me whatever he is doing in the park, which has lowered stress levels considerably. One "fail" when he was quite a way behind me and found a discarded bbq and its associated tasty bits. He did not come back on the whistle. I didnt repeat the whistle and went and got him back on the lead without saying a word. He wasnt best pleased but was soon back on the programme. Overall then, I'm very happy. The book Total Recall is a must have. Now I have to work on another discipline problem which I will post on another thread.
That’s really good to hear. I’m new to this group, we have a rescue 15 month black lab Ozzie and are following the total recall program just up to recall from a different room. He’s doing great but is a nightmare out as hadn’t ever left his garden previously, so is massively over stimulated once past the garden gate. So much for him to learn but he’s doing well. Glad you are having success gives me hope.
