Trouble with Recalls

Hunting dogs. The worst.

Penny had a fabulous recall then it went away when she was probably 9- 12 months and now it's back. I whistle& use the command 'PENNYCOME'. All one word and always in a high, happy voice. How I trained/ worked on my recall is already written in the thread so I won't bother rehashing it but you'll get through it! Add the whistle. It will help For now, I just make the whistle noise& she responds very well to it.

Update on recalls!

My whistle came in a little while ago and re-training is going really really well. At first the novel sound was just plain interesting, so he naturally came running just to see what was up. Now I'm just working on it every day, typically during walks. Our walking path is mostly deserted (especially after dark) so I'm using the 20ft long line, and recalling him back from 10-20ft away. I'm trying to set him up for success every time, but not making it too easy. I haven't called him off of an animal, but I have easily called him off of sniffing in situations where a verbal recall would have been 50/50. So I'm liking it so far. The clarity of the signal and obnoxious noise seems to have made a big difference.

Since we've started agility, I want to make sure I'm practicing a verbal recall too. Should I call him before blowing the whistle, or after? I can think of pros for both methods, though I'm leaning towards blowing the whistle, and then calling him once he's already coming back to me.

You need to be sure that he's understanding that the whistle means "come here NOW" every single time. Just a word of precaution. you've said it yourself in what I quoted, of what you need to be very aware of.

After a while, it's not novel, it's not obnoxious, it can blend in just like everything else given enough exposure and the right competing stimuli and then what???? you need to be ready for that.

If you think it's working because it is new, be careful. It needs to work because you taught it and it is ingrained.

it's ok to use the whistle because you think your voice command lost it's meaning, but you have to be careful not to let the same thing happen with the whistle.

I guess I meant that initially it was novel (like the first day), so there was a natural recall there just because he was curious and it was easy to build on that. It's been over a week now of training it consistently and he knows what it means (in a controlled, medium distraction environment). Doesn't mean he won't/can't learn to ignore it, obviously. I do think that, like a clicker, a non-verbal sound can be easier for a dog to hear, just because it's more clear and less muddied than our constant verbal communication.

I also don't necessarily think my verbal command completely lost its meaning and it was still decent. My issue was getting through to him while he was hunting or in prey drive. It could be that the competing motivator was high enough that he just blew me off. I really think part of it is that he just couldn't hear me when his brain was that focused on something else. My hope is that the whistle will have the benefit of being a new cue, trained well with a strong reinforcement history, plus being a sound that can get through to him in those situations better than my voice can. I'm still using a verbal recall and like I mentioned in my original post, it's quite good in more controlled situations. I just couldn't get the verbal recall consistent in the face of really tough distractions no matter how much foundation work I put in, after the age of 9 months.

they can hear you, trust me, they can and in a sense they "can't" hear you either when the competing stimuli is too great either, which is where training comes in.

and it won't matter if it's your voice, or whistle, if you don't train thru it, then in time a whistle will be no different than your voice. They need to understand that in the face of all other stimuli, that little noise that means, come, needs to be obeyed.

it's not that they hear a clicker better, it just doesn't vary, so in the beginning, it "may" be better for conditioning a behavior, but after a while I think that "advantage" fades as well.

Then we'll just end up back where we started and it won't be the end of the world. He just won't be allowed off of a long line outdoors except in certain circumstances.

I do think there's a difference between a dog who is definitely blowing you off, vs one who is so focused on a scent or animal that his eyes glaze over and he's on another planet. Once in agility class he blew me off and ran around the arena for a minute, sniffing everything. That was clearly a "whee! I'm off leash!" moment and we trained through it. I've also had dogs (in the past) who would occasionally look at you when you called, then go on their merry way. It seems very different from when he gets the trail of deer who were recently in the field and his whole brain falls out of his head - the only thing in his world is that scent and those deer. Maybe they're the same and the training is just much harder in the second case. After over a year of putting in foundations work every day, maybe I'm just not a good enough trainer, or not willing to devote the time truly necessary, to work through those harder situations.