October 30, 2024 • 17 mins
On this week's show, Tony explains why puppy owners need to have a plan on how to train for rock-solid recall so that they can set their dogs up for later success with this crucial command.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about one of
the commands that really makes or breaks a good dog. Recall.
There are a few behaviors that a dog just kind
of has to know and you know, truly obey to
(00:23):
be considered a good sporting dog. You know, steadiness is
a big one, especially if you're the kind of person
who is most comfortable in chest waiters, staring at a
sleeting sky, waiting on some green heads. But even the
most steady dog isn't so great if you can't get
him to come back to you when you need him to.
Recall is huge, and it's one of the biggest holes
in a lot of dogs games. On this show, I'm
(00:44):
going to talk about how to train that into puppies
and to try to keep your dog honest about it
as they mature. I'm real bad at math. When I
say that, I'm not being haha, humble. I'm telling you
the full truth. My little girls, on the other hand,
(01:05):
must have gotten their math genes from their mother, who
can handle numbers in a way that is totally foreign
to me. And now that they are in seventh grade,
their math has eclipsed my level. Again, that's not a joke.
It's true. They are in algebra, and about the time
they started multiplying fractions and doing math problems with parentheses involved,
(01:25):
they left their father in the dust. I was good
with the early stuff, although the way they teach math
now is not the way I learned, and I don't
quite understand that either. It's like they added a lot
of extra steps, and I don't really see why. I do,
at the very least understand how you can't get into
the deeper waters with math without first waiting around in
(01:47):
the shallow stuff. The simple addition and subtraction and division
and so on has to be there, and there has
to be a total understanding of it before you can
start bringing in letters to represent numbers or I don't know,
figure out how many watermelons some fictional math challenge character
bought when they were on sale for some amount, and
some equally fictional supermarket scenario with sparse details and a
(02:11):
bunch of stuff. You got to figure out that basic
math is oftentimes not so basic, but it is important
if you want to learn more advanced stuff. In the
dog world, this is pretty relevant if you want to
do triple blind retrieves. You know at four hundred yards
with perfection, you're going to need to do a lot
of work with your dog on the fundamentals, and we
(02:31):
often skip those or more likely move on before they
are really cemented in place, and that can lead to
a lifetime of frustration when you're trying to level up
your dog. This is most evident for most folks when
it comes to recall. You know, the simple act of
calling your dog back to you. Think about this for
a second. How often have you had serious anxiety with
(02:54):
your dog when you rolled into a situation where you
just knew that, no matter how hard you yell, the
dog was going to do what it wanted to do
and suffer the consequences later. This is common, it's aggravating,
and in the interest of a lot of dogs with
jobs potentially dangerous, it's also almost entirely preventable. My first
(03:17):
exposure to a dog that did not believe for one
second that recall was a command he should listen to
involve my old high school buddy Jared and his Springer
Spaniel Eddie. Keep in mind, in high school, Jared and
I weren't the smartest kids in class. We probably weren't
even in the top half, to be honest, but we
hunted very hard, and since I couldn't have a dog
(03:38):
for reasons i'll put into a book someday, I sort
of pseudo parented my friend's dog. Jared and I were
tight enough where he'd let me take Eddie to hunt
when he couldn't, which if you know bird dogs, you
know that's not something to be taken lightly. And Eddie
was the kind of springer that liked to hunt. His
stubby tail never stopped moving, and while we messed with
(04:00):
words where we lived in the bottom right hand corner
of Minnesota, we also spent a lot of time driving
an hour south to hunt Iowa during the high water
mark of rooster populations back in the late nineties. I
don't know how much school we skipped to feasant hunt,
but I do know that during my senior year I
had to sit down with the principal to negotiate my
punishment for it when they figured out just how much
school I had been missing defeasant hunt. We killed plenty
(04:23):
of roosters over Eddie, but we also watched him do
his own thing. I remember watching him bump into a
cottontail one time, and he took off across a snow covered,
chisel plowed field right toward a farmhouse. Jared yelled, screamed,
lit him up with the e caller, and promptly ran
out of options. There was no level of anger that
(04:43):
he could reach or electricity he could deliver from afar
to get that dog off of that bunny's trail. And
as we watched the situation play out, hoping that there
wasn't a giant dog of some sort guarding the farmhouse
because Eddie would have fought him and lost, we eventually
lost sight of Eddie. Five minutes later he came trotting
(05:04):
across that field with Thumper fully deceased and clenched firmly
in his teeth. Some dogs just have the drive to
go after certain critters, and they get such a single
minded focus on that that I don't know if you
can train it out of him after it sticks. Maybe
you can, but it'll cause you to go a little
grayer and question whether you should maybe just get a
(05:25):
cat for me. At least with my old dog, it
was turkeys. I don't know what was rattling around in
her brain from a young age, but the scent of
turkeys or the sight of turkeys made Luna decide that
it was her moment and you weren't going to keep
her from them. While actually bird hunting, it was sometimes
easier to call her off shed hunting scouting, just taking
(05:49):
a walk in the woods and we ran into turkeys.
Forget it. I haven't met that animal or situation with
my new pup yet, but that might be entire because
she has that scooby and shaggy coward gene in her
where she's pretty much only comfortable keeping me within eyesight.
But maybe we just haven't stumbled into what will make
(06:10):
Sadie run with abandonment and ignore me completely. The thing
about recall, really good recall, is it starts young. It
has to. And I'm not talking eight months here, I'm
talking eight weeks. When you get that puppy, you know,
the one that's all stubby, sausage legs and snuggles, it's
easy to get lulled into the false belief that it'll
(06:31):
be right or diet your side forever. Now I had
about three months most of them fully dispel that notion.
The key to laying this foundation is through treat training.
Most young puppies don't care as much about you as
they do food, and this is the way to motivate them.
It's also important to look at setting up your training
sessions in a way where you really don't give the
(06:52):
dog much of a choice but to engage in the
desired behavior, but to also make them believe they are
making the right choice. I know that's about as clear
as the Mississippi River delta. I just spent some time
fishing down in Cajun country, so let me explain. A
(07:18):
check cord and a handful of kibble are your friends
with young pupps and recall. I suppose it doesn't really
matter the length of cord, although I prefer longer chords
versus shorter chords, so maybe it does. Anyway, get that
puppy on a check cord, let it roam when it
gets out of ways, say its name so you get
its attention, and then use whatever recall command you choose.
(07:41):
I use COUM, but here is fine. It doesn't really
matter as long as you're consistent. Anyway, what the pup
will most likely do is totally ignore you. That's where
the check cord comes in. While repeating your recall command,
reel that sucker in like it's an adorable land based fish.
As soon as the pup gets to you is treat
time now. No matter how interesting the yard smells, the
(08:05):
dog will start to connect the recall command with something positive,
which in this case is just a little treat, maybe
a little love, simple right kind of. This is not
a one and done thing here. This is just baby
step number one. This is also something that can work
in conjunction with another tactic, which Tom Doc can explain
(08:26):
to me patiently one time after I admitted that one
of my pups was just more comfortable going its own way. Now,
when you're working with a young pup and its off leash,
and really even if you have a checkhord dragging behind
it and you want the dog at your side, simply
turn around and walk away. When they're little enough, they
almost always eventually notice this and run to your side
(08:47):
because they don't want to be alone. You are their safety.
This is a good opportunity to give them a treat
as well, but also sets the stage up for heel
training later. But mostly you want to start reeling your
puppy in on that check cord and making that positive
connection between the command and the behavior. If you keep
that check cord attached, you can turn any little adventure
(09:07):
into a training session, and you should. What I mean
by this is that this is a great move in
the yard. You know when you're doing a dedicated training mission,
even if that's a two minute deal. But over time,
you want to expose your growing dog to new environments
where the distractions will have a lot more gravity than
the usual stuff your dog sees and smells on your
home turf. This is where training really levels up. If
(09:32):
you take your pup to the soccer fields at the
neighborhood park, you might see other folks with dogs. There
is nothing that will capture and command a young dog's
attention more than seeing another dog. This is also one
of the reasons why getting two puppies at one time
is almost always a recipe for total training disaster. But
this goes beyond that. People will want to pet your puppy.
(09:54):
There will be butterflies to chase and interesting tufts of
grass and bushes to sniff. There's a world to and zoom,
and it's all new and interesting. That kind of thing
doesn't really stop for dogs, so they need to learn
that no matter what has caught their attention, when you
say the word, they got to get back to you. Eventually,
you're not gonna have a pocket full of kibble everywhere
(10:15):
you go. And this usually coincides with the age at
which pups grow into their confidence. Some that's a double
whammy where you're going to have to relinquish a powerful
training tool while also watching your dog decide to check
out the world without you at its side. At this point,
the work you did when he was a puppy will
really decide the arc of your next year or so.
(10:38):
The more that dog learned to connect recall with a reward,
the easier it will be to get him to engage
in that behavior for you when he's off leash in
a fun environment, maybe even during your first woodcock or
grouse hunts of the year. For hunting dogs, especially dogs
that like to retrieve stuff, this stage again doesn't have
to be terrible because you have a way to reward
(10:59):
them through a bumper. This is one of the reasons
I just kind of like female labs. You generally get
a fairly timid personality that's mixed with a high retrieving desire.
If you get the right bloodlines. That means a raised
voice often gets their attention, and the ability to give
them exactly what they want is a reward is pretty
cut and dry. Now, this isn't the case with all dogs, obviously,
(11:22):
so it's a matter of, you know, sort of starting
over with recall, but off leash at various distances in
relatively controlled environments. What I mean by that is environments
that are comfortable for the dog and very light on distractions.
A lot of dogs follow similar training paths where you
start small and easy and work out to some degree,
(11:42):
but then you add a new environment or a new
wrinkle to the training, and you back up to the easy,
small stuff that they already have nailed. Eventually, the command
or the training, whatever it is, allows you to go
into the big environments with lots of distractions. But it's
so important to not outdrive your headlights just because you're
bored with the current training. The dog will dictate your
(12:04):
timing on this stuff, and it doesn't matter how much
you want to see them do those triple blind retrieves
to perfection, because all that will do is convince you
to skip necessary steps and see positives where there are
only really false positives. Now I have to say this
because if I don't, lots of smart listeners will. The
recall command is just part of so many bigger things
(12:25):
than dog behavior. It's a piece of the overall retrieving puzzle,
but just one of many that might involve heel and
steadiness and hand signals and a whole slew of behaviors
that are taught individually but eventually daisy chained into a
desirable skill. But for now, you want to teach your
dog to come to you every time you want him
to come to you, regardless of what's going on around.
(12:49):
This is something that takes a lot of reinforcement and
is often the point in which people buy an E
caller out of frustration. Now, E callers can be an
excellent tool for enforcing commands like recall, but they won't
allow you to not train it correctly in the first place.
You can't correct a dog that doesn't fully understand what
(13:09):
it's doing wrong. A dog that knows its recall command
and really demonstrates that knowledge over time is a dog
that might be ready for E call or reinforcement. But
that's a whole other topic for a different podcast. A
better way to look at It is the way a
lot of folks in my generation and younger look at
retirement planning and social security. No one really knows if
(13:31):
social security will be there for any of the generations
coming up, so planning on full benefits now might just
be a mistake. We don't know. What we do know
is that it's better to save automatically into different retirement
vehicles to reach your goals without the safety net of
social Security. If it's there in some form, that's gravy.
If not, well, that sucks in a lot of ways,
(13:53):
but you will be ready either way with the recall command.
You want it solid in your dog, not just for you,
but for your wife, your kids, for the dog walker,
for whoever. This takes time and allows you to read
your dog's behavior and tell when distractions will be there
and what they might do to your dog's willingness to
get his ass back to you. A simple way to
(14:14):
reinforce this, at least with a lot of high drive dogs,
is to not let them get away with not coming
to you during training sessions. A well bred dog is
going to want to train. It's going to be fun
for them, it's going to be one of their favorite things.
But if your dog decides sniffing a fence post for
two minutes during the middle of a session is something
he can get away with, and that training session don't
(14:37):
reward him. Even the dimmest of dogs will usually figure
out that they are in control of whether the fund
keeps happening, and that will mean they can choose a
positive behavior and keep it going, or choose a negative
behavior and end the session. Young dogs get this around
quite a bit, but older dogs usually don't. It's also
important to bring this home on a different level. If
(14:59):
you go out to see or hunt or whatever, you
will encounter something potentially dangerous to your dog at some point.
Traffic is a big one, but so are porcupines and
fences and farmyards with big, mean dogs and a lot
of other stuff good enough when it comes to recall
might not be so, and it might result in a
bad injury out in the field. The ability to always
(15:21):
get your dog back to you is not only something
that makes dog ownership so much better and hunting more
effective and enjoyable, but it's also a huge safety net
that you know out there in a world where your
dog might not even have a clue that there's something
dangerous around the corner. It's on you to keep them safe.
You know, when you're out in the cat till slew
(15:42):
and your dog watches a deer runaway and decides that
he still has just enough wolf DNA to try to
catch it all while the whole thing heads on a
course for the two lane highway that borders the property.
You really want control there and there's no way around it.
And if you have a dog that won't listen to you,
you know how frustrating and scary that lack of specific
control can be. It's not just that the dog loves
(16:04):
to chase turkeys for some reason, which is bad enough,
but it's that those turkeys could lead her into traffic,
or to run headlong into a barbere of fence or whatever.
It's no bueno. And the prevention starts with little pups
long before ever setting foot in the field. If you're
working with one now, or have one on order, or
maybe you're just struggling through an independent minded two year old,
(16:26):
pay attention to how effective your recall command is. If
it isn't locked down pretty tightly, you got to work
on it, train for it in a way that will
allow your dog the chance to make the right decisions
for you and for him. And come back next week
because I'm going to talk about energy, how to manage it,
and dogs, how we present our own energy to them
when we're training, you know, the whole dang thing. My friends.
(16:51):
That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has
been the Houndation's podcast. As always, Thank you so much
for listening. We truly appreciate your support here at meat Eater.
If you have not gotten enough I don't know, hunting content,
dog content, whatever this week, head on over to the
Mediator dot com. We are always dropping new hunting films, articles, recipes,
(17:14):
tons of different podcasts out there. We've got Bear Grease,
We've got God's Country, We've got met Eater Radio. If
you have a long commute, or if you're driving somewhere
maybe to South Dakota to hunt some roosters or whatever,
and you need to kill some time and be educated
and entertained at the same time, at Mediator podcast network
has a lot going on. Go over to the Mediator
(17:34):
dot com and check it out, and again, thank you
so much for your support.
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about one of
the commands that really makes or breaks a good dog. Recall.
There are a few behaviors that a dog just kind
of has to know and you know, truly obey to
(00:23):
be considered a good sporting dog. You know, steadiness is
a big one, especially if you're the kind of person
who is most comfortable in chest waiters, staring at a
sleeting sky, waiting on some green heads. But even the
most steady dog isn't so great if you can't get
him to come back to you when you need him to.
Recall is huge, and it's one of the biggest holes
in a lot of dogs games. On this show, I'm
(00:44):
going to talk about how to train that into puppies
and to try to keep your dog honest about it
as they mature. I'm real bad at math. When I
say that, I'm not being haha, humble. I'm telling you
the full truth. My little girls, on the other hand,
(01:05):
must have gotten their math genes from their mother, who
can handle numbers in a way that is totally foreign
to me. And now that they are in seventh grade,
their math has eclipsed my level. Again, that's not a joke.
It's true. They are in algebra, and about the time
they started multiplying fractions and doing math problems with parentheses involved,
(01:25):
they left their father in the dust. I was good
with the early stuff, although the way they teach math
now is not the way I learned, and I don't
quite understand that either. It's like they added a lot
of extra steps, and I don't really see why. I do,
at the very least understand how you can't get into
the deeper waters with math without first waiting around in
(01:47):
the shallow stuff. The simple addition and subtraction and division
and so on has to be there, and there has
to be a total understanding of it before you can
start bringing in letters to represent numbers or I don't know,
figure out how many watermelons some fictional math challenge character
bought when they were on sale for some amount, and
some equally fictional supermarket scenario with sparse details and a
(02:11):
bunch of stuff. You got to figure out that basic
math is oftentimes not so basic, but it is important
if you want to learn more advanced stuff. In the
dog world, this is pretty relevant if you want to
do triple blind retrieves. You know at four hundred yards
with perfection, you're going to need to do a lot
of work with your dog on the fundamentals, and we
(02:31):
often skip those or more likely move on before they
are really cemented in place, and that can lead to
a lifetime of frustration when you're trying to level up
your dog. This is most evident for most folks when
it comes to recall. You know, the simple act of
calling your dog back to you. Think about this for
a second. How often have you had serious anxiety with
(02:54):
your dog when you rolled into a situation where you
just knew that, no matter how hard you yell, the
dog was going to do what it wanted to do
and suffer the consequences later. This is common, it's aggravating,
and in the interest of a lot of dogs with
jobs potentially dangerous, it's also almost entirely preventable. My first
(03:17):
exposure to a dog that did not believe for one
second that recall was a command he should listen to
involve my old high school buddy Jared and his Springer
Spaniel Eddie. Keep in mind, in high school, Jared and
I weren't the smartest kids in class. We probably weren't
even in the top half, to be honest, but we
hunted very hard, and since I couldn't have a dog
(03:38):
for reasons i'll put into a book someday, I sort
of pseudo parented my friend's dog. Jared and I were
tight enough where he'd let me take Eddie to hunt
when he couldn't, which if you know bird dogs, you
know that's not something to be taken lightly. And Eddie
was the kind of springer that liked to hunt. His
stubby tail never stopped moving, and while we messed with
(04:00):
words where we lived in the bottom right hand corner
of Minnesota, we also spent a lot of time driving
an hour south to hunt Iowa during the high water
mark of rooster populations back in the late nineties. I
don't know how much school we skipped to feasant hunt,
but I do know that during my senior year I
had to sit down with the principal to negotiate my
punishment for it when they figured out just how much
school I had been missing defeasant hunt. We killed plenty
(04:23):
of roosters over Eddie, but we also watched him do
his own thing. I remember watching him bump into a
cottontail one time, and he took off across a snow covered,
chisel plowed field right toward a farmhouse. Jared yelled, screamed,
lit him up with the e caller, and promptly ran
out of options. There was no level of anger that
(04:43):
he could reach or electricity he could deliver from afar
to get that dog off of that bunny's trail. And
as we watched the situation play out, hoping that there
wasn't a giant dog of some sort guarding the farmhouse
because Eddie would have fought him and lost, we eventually
lost sight of Eddie. Five minutes later he came trotting
(05:04):
across that field with Thumper fully deceased and clenched firmly
in his teeth. Some dogs just have the drive to
go after certain critters, and they get such a single
minded focus on that that I don't know if you
can train it out of him after it sticks. Maybe
you can, but it'll cause you to go a little
grayer and question whether you should maybe just get a
(05:25):
cat for me. At least with my old dog, it
was turkeys. I don't know what was rattling around in
her brain from a young age, but the scent of
turkeys or the sight of turkeys made Luna decide that
it was her moment and you weren't going to keep
her from them. While actually bird hunting, it was sometimes
easier to call her off shed hunting scouting, just taking
(05:49):
a walk in the woods and we ran into turkeys.
Forget it. I haven't met that animal or situation with
my new pup yet, but that might be entire because
she has that scooby and shaggy coward gene in her
where she's pretty much only comfortable keeping me within eyesight.
But maybe we just haven't stumbled into what will make
(06:10):
Sadie run with abandonment and ignore me completely. The thing
about recall, really good recall, is it starts young. It
has to. And I'm not talking eight months here, I'm
talking eight weeks. When you get that puppy, you know,
the one that's all stubby, sausage legs and snuggles, it's
easy to get lulled into the false belief that it'll
(06:31):
be right or diet your side forever. Now I had
about three months most of them fully dispel that notion.
The key to laying this foundation is through treat training.
Most young puppies don't care as much about you as
they do food, and this is the way to motivate them.
It's also important to look at setting up your training
sessions in a way where you really don't give the
(06:52):
dog much of a choice but to engage in the
desired behavior, but to also make them believe they are
making the right choice. I know that's about as clear
as the Mississippi River delta. I just spent some time
fishing down in Cajun country, so let me explain. A
(07:18):
check cord and a handful of kibble are your friends
with young pupps and recall. I suppose it doesn't really
matter the length of cord, although I prefer longer chords
versus shorter chords, so maybe it does. Anyway, get that
puppy on a check cord, let it roam when it
gets out of ways, say its name so you get
its attention, and then use whatever recall command you choose.
(07:41):
I use COUM, but here is fine. It doesn't really
matter as long as you're consistent. Anyway, what the pup
will most likely do is totally ignore you. That's where
the check cord comes in. While repeating your recall command,
reel that sucker in like it's an adorable land based fish.
As soon as the pup gets to you is treat
time now. No matter how interesting the yard smells, the
(08:05):
dog will start to connect the recall command with something positive,
which in this case is just a little treat, maybe
a little love, simple right kind of. This is not
a one and done thing here. This is just baby
step number one. This is also something that can work
in conjunction with another tactic, which Tom Doc can explain
(08:26):
to me patiently one time after I admitted that one
of my pups was just more comfortable going its own way. Now,
when you're working with a young pup and its off leash,
and really even if you have a checkhord dragging behind
it and you want the dog at your side, simply
turn around and walk away. When they're little enough, they
almost always eventually notice this and run to your side
(08:47):
because they don't want to be alone. You are their safety.
This is a good opportunity to give them a treat
as well, but also sets the stage up for heel
training later. But mostly you want to start reeling your
puppy in on that check cord and making that positive
connection between the command and the behavior. If you keep
that check cord attached, you can turn any little adventure
(09:07):
into a training session, and you should. What I mean
by this is that this is a great move in
the yard. You know when you're doing a dedicated training mission,
even if that's a two minute deal. But over time,
you want to expose your growing dog to new environments
where the distractions will have a lot more gravity than
the usual stuff your dog sees and smells on your
home turf. This is where training really levels up. If
(09:32):
you take your pup to the soccer fields at the
neighborhood park, you might see other folks with dogs. There
is nothing that will capture and command a young dog's
attention more than seeing another dog. This is also one
of the reasons why getting two puppies at one time
is almost always a recipe for total training disaster. But
this goes beyond that. People will want to pet your puppy.
(09:54):
There will be butterflies to chase and interesting tufts of
grass and bushes to sniff. There's a world to and zoom,
and it's all new and interesting. That kind of thing
doesn't really stop for dogs, so they need to learn
that no matter what has caught their attention, when you
say the word, they got to get back to you. Eventually,
you're not gonna have a pocket full of kibble everywhere
(10:15):
you go. And this usually coincides with the age at
which pups grow into their confidence. Some that's a double
whammy where you're going to have to relinquish a powerful
training tool while also watching your dog decide to check
out the world without you at its side. At this point,
the work you did when he was a puppy will
really decide the arc of your next year or so.
(10:38):
The more that dog learned to connect recall with a reward,
the easier it will be to get him to engage
in that behavior for you when he's off leash in
a fun environment, maybe even during your first woodcock or
grouse hunts of the year. For hunting dogs, especially dogs
that like to retrieve stuff, this stage again doesn't have
to be terrible because you have a way to reward
(10:59):
them through a bumper. This is one of the reasons
I just kind of like female labs. You generally get
a fairly timid personality that's mixed with a high retrieving desire.
If you get the right bloodlines. That means a raised
voice often gets their attention, and the ability to give
them exactly what they want is a reward is pretty
cut and dry. Now, this isn't the case with all dogs, obviously,
(11:22):
so it's a matter of, you know, sort of starting
over with recall, but off leash at various distances in
relatively controlled environments. What I mean by that is environments
that are comfortable for the dog and very light on distractions.
A lot of dogs follow similar training paths where you
start small and easy and work out to some degree,
(11:42):
but then you add a new environment or a new
wrinkle to the training, and you back up to the easy,
small stuff that they already have nailed. Eventually, the command
or the training, whatever it is, allows you to go
into the big environments with lots of distractions. But it's
so important to not outdrive your headlights just because you're
bored with the current training. The dog will dictate your
(12:04):
timing on this stuff, and it doesn't matter how much
you want to see them do those triple blind retrieves
to perfection, because all that will do is convince you
to skip necessary steps and see positives where there are
only really false positives. Now I have to say this
because if I don't, lots of smart listeners will. The
recall command is just part of so many bigger things
(12:25):
than dog behavior. It's a piece of the overall retrieving puzzle,
but just one of many that might involve heel and
steadiness and hand signals and a whole slew of behaviors
that are taught individually but eventually daisy chained into a
desirable skill. But for now, you want to teach your
dog to come to you every time you want him
to come to you, regardless of what's going on around.
(12:49):
This is something that takes a lot of reinforcement and
is often the point in which people buy an E
caller out of frustration. Now, E callers can be an
excellent tool for enforcing commands like recall, but they won't
allow you to not train it correctly in the first place.
You can't correct a dog that doesn't fully understand what
(13:09):
it's doing wrong. A dog that knows its recall command
and really demonstrates that knowledge over time is a dog
that might be ready for E call or reinforcement. But
that's a whole other topic for a different podcast. A
better way to look at It is the way a
lot of folks in my generation and younger look at
retirement planning and social security. No one really knows if
(13:31):
social security will be there for any of the generations
coming up, so planning on full benefits now might just
be a mistake. We don't know. What we do know
is that it's better to save automatically into different retirement
vehicles to reach your goals without the safety net of
social Security. If it's there in some form, that's gravy.
If not, well, that sucks in a lot of ways,
(13:53):
but you will be ready either way with the recall command.
You want it solid in your dog, not just for you,
but for your wife, your kids, for the dog walker,
for whoever. This takes time and allows you to read
your dog's behavior and tell when distractions will be there
and what they might do to your dog's willingness to
get his ass back to you. A simple way to
(14:14):
reinforce this, at least with a lot of high drive dogs,
is to not let them get away with not coming
to you during training sessions. A well bred dog is
going to want to train. It's going to be fun
for them, it's going to be one of their favorite things.
But if your dog decides sniffing a fence post for
two minutes during the middle of a session is something
he can get away with, and that training session don't
(14:37):
reward him. Even the dimmest of dogs will usually figure
out that they are in control of whether the fund
keeps happening, and that will mean they can choose a
positive behavior and keep it going, or choose a negative
behavior and end the session. Young dogs get this around
quite a bit, but older dogs usually don't. It's also
important to bring this home on a different level. If
(14:59):
you go out to see or hunt or whatever, you
will encounter something potentially dangerous to your dog at some point.
Traffic is a big one, but so are porcupines and
fences and farmyards with big, mean dogs and a lot
of other stuff good enough when it comes to recall
might not be so, and it might result in a
bad injury out in the field. The ability to always
(15:21):
get your dog back to you is not only something
that makes dog ownership so much better and hunting more
effective and enjoyable, but it's also a huge safety net
that you know out there in a world where your
dog might not even have a clue that there's something
dangerous around the corner. It's on you to keep them safe.
You know, when you're out in the cat till slew
(15:42):
and your dog watches a deer runaway and decides that
he still has just enough wolf DNA to try to
catch it all while the whole thing heads on a
course for the two lane highway that borders the property.
You really want control there and there's no way around it.
And if you have a dog that won't listen to you,
you know how frustrating and scary that lack of specific
control can be. It's not just that the dog loves
(16:04):
to chase turkeys for some reason, which is bad enough,
but it's that those turkeys could lead her into traffic,
or to run headlong into a barbere of fence or whatever.
It's no bueno. And the prevention starts with little pups
long before ever setting foot in the field. If you're
working with one now, or have one on order, or
maybe you're just struggling through an independent minded two year old,
(16:26):
pay attention to how effective your recall command is. If
it isn't locked down pretty tightly, you got to work
on it, train for it in a way that will
allow your dog the chance to make the right decisions
for you and for him. And come back next week
because I'm going to talk about energy, how to manage it,
and dogs, how we present our own energy to them
when we're training, you know, the whole dang thing. My friends.
(16:51):
That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has
been the Houndation's podcast. As always, Thank you so much
for listening. We truly appreciate your support here at meat Eater.
If you have not gotten enough I don't know, hunting content,
dog content, whatever this week, head on over to the
Mediator dot com. We are always dropping new hunting films, articles, recipes,
(17:14):
tons of different podcasts out there. We've got Bear Grease,
We've got God's Country, We've got met Eater Radio. If
you have a long commute, or if you're driving somewhere
maybe to South Dakota to hunt some roosters or whatever,
and you need to kill some time and be educated
and entertained at the same time, at Mediator podcast network
has a lot going on. Go over to the Mediator
(17:34):
dot com and check it out, and again, thank you
so much for your support.
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