Fly's Recall Training

This weekend, we have had two trips to the park to work on Fly's recall so that we can trust him off lead.

We decided to train him to a whistle and started by having him on a 15ft line.

We found a nice quiet spot away from other dog walkers and played some really fun games with him that got Lucian involved and enjoying himself too. It was great fun!

First we played 'Drop the Cookie'. This entails tossing a cookie a few feet away from Fly then running like crazy in the opposite direction. The idea is that he ignores the temptation and the distraction of the cookie (which could represent any distraction such as another dog for example) then follows us instead. I blew the whistle when he started to chase us to get him to associate the whistle with 'come, follow us'.

Then we played 'Hide & Seek' which Lucian could relate to really well.
Lucian came with me to hide behind trees while Fly stayed with Jay on the long line, then I blew the whistle and as soon as Fly found us we sounded the clicker and gave him lots of treats and fuss.

Another game we played was 'Wounded Caribou' whereby we ran about playing with Fly's rope toy and trying to rile him up into a frenzy of excitement. Then suddenly we would stop dead, nobody look at Fly and all walk off very, very slowly. The idea of this game is to teach the dog to control himself quickly if he gets over excited. The trouble is we actually struggled to get him very excitable! Kinda begged the question as to whether we wanted to teach him to reach that level of excitement at all. We might just use this game if and when we have trouble with Fly failing to control himself.

Fly was tired out after all the excitement, so we slowed down and did a few plain recalls. Jay held onto Fly, I walked off then blew the whistle to test out whether Fly had truly learned what the whistle means. He had. He came streaking toward me and of course got a click and lots of rewards.

Jay suggested that maybe he was only coming because he wanted to get to me, being his main 'handler' - which was a good point, so we swapped over. We were pleased when Fly still responded correctly and although he checked back to me for direction, he eventually decided to follow the whistle and ran to Jay.
It was evident that he had learned that whistle = come.
All we have to do now is practice until we fully trust that we are in control of Fly off lead.

Next weekend I will try to make a video as it is so much easier to explain when you can see him in action.

We are very pleased with how Fly is coming along and the £60 we spent booking him into formal training classes for April might turn out to be a bit of a waste of money!