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As off-leash parks become a more popular destination for urban dogs it’s essential we keep them enjoyable and safe. Educating the public about dogs is crucial to accomplishing this goal. Most problems do not come ‘out of nowhere’ and people need to understand more about dog body language to avoid these issues. Aggression commonly occurs as a result of not reading the dog’s body signals or as a consequence of inadvertently putting too much social pressure on dogs. Space can be a major factor!
People also have to teach their dogs a recall. This not an easy skill to teach, but it is a very valuable one. We can work on teaching dogs to check-in and come when called by rewarding successive approximations and using management tools, such as a long line. Dogs will do what gets them reinforcement and this poses a problem with social dogs that run all over at a park. Whether their owner calls them on or not the dog wants to play with other dogs, meet new people and smell new things. After all, they get to spend the rest of the day with their owner and often, being around their owner predicts leaving the park.
To teach recall we need to start by working on the behaviour away from the park or distractions enabling the dog to become comfortable and understand that turning away from distractions are what we want. This takes continual practice. In the beginning this skill can be taught with any dog at home and progresses to being on-leash outside. When your dog turns his head away from a distraction, pay him for it. Payment can be made using treats, a game with a toy, special social interaction with praise and touch that your dog enjoys, or access to a new direction he wants to go. We start with just adding reinforcement to the behaviour of turning away and then add a cue to that behaviour; for example, “come” or “here”. Avoid using the cue until the dog displays this behaviour consistently at a high frequency. Using recall cues by saying them when our dog is distracted and cannot listen only encourages them to ignore it. The more dogs are around low-level distractions in a controlled environment, the more they learn that reinforcement happens for certain behaviour, and they will be able to function in greater distractions. We can help dogs understand that the goal behaviour is for them to come to us, by rewarding them in our general vicinity.
The biggest problem with teaching a dog recall is that we want to gradually increase the level of distractions while keeping them successful with displaying the ‘turn away’ or ‘look at me behaviour.’ We progressively increase distractions and then add in distance, as the dog is successful with the each approximation. Always have a management tool, like a leash or long line, to be able to influence your dog as we want to avoid the dog not getting the opportunity to indulge in the external reinforcement at the wrong time. Allow your dog freedom and reward him lavishly for any contact with you.
What often happens is we use our recall cue in our house a couple times and give our dogs some verbal praise. Then we take Fido to the park, let him off leash and say our cue and Fido continues to run around and ignore us. The changes in criteria between the house and the park are vast, and the behaviour we are wanting looks very different to the dog due to the distance and distraction level. Start training your dog today for this very important skill and you will see improvements in your dog’s recall behaviour and your dog park visits will be safer.
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