Back To Basics: How To Train Your Dog to Recall

Have you ever felt like you're talking to a wall when you call your dog to come to you? I realized a while ago that my little dog, Sully’s, recall had gotten worse. After some thought, I decided to start completely over with recall training, and I’m inviting you along for the ride. 

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Navigate to Where You Want To Go

1. What Is Recall?

2. How Do You Get Your Dog To Come When You Call Them? 

3. Is It Harder To Teach Some Dogs Recall?

4. Why Am I Starting Over With Sully’s Recall?

5. How Do You Start Teaching Recall?

6. The Secret Ingredient 

7. Questions From Our Community

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What Is Recall?

Recall is the term used to describe a dog coming to us when we call them. In reality, the “recall behavior” is actually multiple behaviors performed sequentially. Those behaviors may vary a bit depending on what the dog was doing, what you cued, and when/how you marked and reinforced. 

Generally speaking, when you call your dog to come, your dog will: Stop moving (if they are moving away from you), turn towards you/orient to you, run to you, stop when they get to you, and station in front of you (aka sit or stand in front of you). I often simplify this to: 1) Orient to you; 2) Move towards you; 3) Station by you. 

By thinking about individual behaviors that make up a dog’s recall, we can really hone in on strengthening those component parts, which can help us build a stronger overall recall.

Understanding the individual behaviors that make up the broader sequence of behaviors we label “recall” is incredibly helpful in training. We will loop back to this in the future! 

How Do You Get Your Dog To Come When You Call Them?

For now, let’s start with the basics. 

When you call your dog to come, are they coming just because you asked them to? Sorta ... But not exactly. 

Have you heard people say that “reinforcement drives behavior”? Whether or not your dog comes when you call them is determined by what happened under similar conditions in the PAST after they came to you. 

The most basic unit when talking about operant behavior, which is voluntary behavior that is increased or decreased as a function of its consequences, is the Antecedent - Behavior - Consequence (A-B-C) unit. You want to start by defining the behavior you are looking at. The antecedent and consequence are stimuli or events that happen in the behaver’s environment. The antecedent comes before the behavior, and the consequence comes after the behavior.

“Come” is an example of a cue (in this case, a verbal one). When you call your dog, it signals the opportunity for them to access reinforcers (like treats) if they come to you. In other words, your recall cue (e.g. “come”) tells your dog what behavior-consequence contingencies are in play. 

Here’s a human example of how cues work: When your phone rings (cue), if you answer it (behavior), someone on the other end will talk to you (consequence). Your phone ringing signals to you that the behavior-consequence contingency of “if you answer the phone, someone on the other end will talk to you” is now in play. If you answer the phone when it’s not ringing, there won’t be anyone on the other end who will talk to you. 

So … your dog isn’t recalling simply because you told them to or because “they know what the word come means.” How they respond to your recall cue in the present moment is determined by what outcomes their behavior produced in the past under similar conditions. 

This gets more complicated. For example, there are a lot of factors that may change how motivating a particular consequence is. I talked about this using the same human example as above (phone calls) in a recent Instagram post if you want to check it out.

We’ll leave it here for now. 

Is It Harder To Teach Some Dogs Recall?

It might help to know a little bit about Sully. She is my great humbler, and I probably don’t thank her enough for all that she has taught me. She is not an “easy dog” in many ways, but I can rest easy knowing that the same behavior principles that apply to every other living animal apply to her. 

Someone once described her as a “bloodhound in a terrier-like agile body,” and I thought that was fairly accurate (though I don’t think it fully captures her “prey drive” behaviors … in quotes because there is far more to it than “drive,” but I am not going to get into it here). Long story short: she finds the environment SUPER reinforcing. 

When I say I say Sully loves the outdoors, I mean she is literally one with nature. I am competing with the dirt we walk on. I’d like to tell you that it’s rare that she gets herself this dirty, but that would be a lie.

On top of how much sniffy-hunty behavior she does, I struggled at first to even find reinforcers I could reliably use. When I first adopted her, she wouldn’t eat treats outside (she would occasionally, but not consistently enough to do anything meaningful with them). Someone might have labeled her “not food motivated,” but it was more so that the relative value of food went down when outdoors and she didn’t have a big reinforcement history for eating outside. I had to spend a fair bit of time just working on eating outdoors in a range of environments before I could even consider using food as a reinforcer for other behaviors like recall, which I worked really hard to build with her. 

So with all of that said, my very honest answer is this: Yes, I do think it’s harder to teach some dogs to reliably respond to your recall cues than others. Dogs have unique learning histories and may find different things reinforcing.

BUT, that doesn’t mean that it cannot be done or that “positive reinforcement won’t work because a dog is [insert whatever breed you want].” The strongest recalls are built by creating big reinforcement histories for coming when called. Did you know that discretionary effort is one of the unique side effects of R+? 

The phrase discretionary effort comes from the work of Aubrey Daniels, a behavioral psychologist who specializes in applying behavior science principles in the workplace.

With some dogs, we may just have to be more aware of what the dog finds reinforcing, what antecedents are at play (i.e. motivating operations), and how we move the recall behavior into new settings. Some dogs may tend to find treats WAY more reinforcing than nature, and that can make it “easier” (perhaps more “forgiving”) to build solid recall.

I know how to train recall (I LOVE doing it), and I still find myself in a position where I have to start over … which is okay! So please know you are in good company if you find yourself there too.

Why Am I Starting Over With Sully’s Recall?

Put simply: I don’t want to fight the learning history she has with her current recall cue (“come”). 

It has become hit or miss whether she’ll come when we call her, and if she does come, the latency of the behavior is often high and the speed is often slow … not what I’m aiming for 😅. 

Here are the three main measures of recall I’ve been using: 

1. Does she come when called (defined as coming all the way to me)? This is a Yes/No data point. I should be logging mostly “yesses” here, but she was not coming at all when called about 50% of the time. 

2. How quickly does she START to come to me after I call her (this measure is called latency)? I measure this in seconds. I want her recall behavior to be LOW latency (aka very short time between me calling her and her starting to come). However, I was seeing pretty high latency behavior (i.e. when I called her, she would often take 4 to 7 seconds to start to move towards me).

3. How quickly does she complete her recall behavior (this is called speed)? The amount of time it takes for her to travel all the way to me is going to vary depending on how far away from me she is when I call her, so I am typically rating her speed as slow, medium, fast, or lightning fast. I was getting a lot of slow and medium recall speeds, which isn’t what I am aiming for. 

Her recall used to be much better than it is right now, so what happened? A number of things could have happened. 

We could have inadvertently punished her recall behavior by following it up with something aversive (which is defined as anything an individual behaves to escape or avoid). An example of this might be using your recall cue at a dog park and then leashing your dog to leave the park or calling your dog to come and then picking them up to put them in the bathtub. Those examples aren’t fitting for Sully, but punishment still could be at play. 

Perhaps more easily done than punishing recall, we might not have actually been reinforcing her recall when we thought we were. Just because you deliver a treat does not mean you reinforced that recall – you only know you reinforced it if you see the behavior strengthened or maintained in the future under similar conditions … and we are not seeing that play out. 

What I feel confident we did was use her recall cue in situations where she couldn’t perform the desired behavior (aka immediately and with speed run to me). To be clear, I know the rules here (only use the cue when confident the dog can respond), but Sully is harder for me to make predictions with (the value of food is a lot less static than it is with many dogs and the environment is just SO interesting), so plenty of these instances were just accidents (i.e. I thought she was gonna recall). Though to be clear, plenty of the instances were just me and my partner, Ben being sloppy (and maybe a bit greedy) by calling her when we had no business doing that 🤣.

To some degree, she’s likely learned that her recall cue is irrelevant under certain conditions (it’s basically just become background noise that doesn’t signal anything meaningful for her). We used the cue too many times without a response, so that means the cue didn’t lead to a reinforcer all those times … so it’s just weakening more and more. 

She now has a huge history (that I don’t love) with the cue “come,” and I’d be fighting it if I wanted to use that cue in my training to try to change her recall behavior. I don’t want to fight her history, so I am creating a new recall cue, Ewok (because she looks like an adorable Ewok) and starting at square one. This allows me to get the desired behavior (immediate response and fast run to me) and slowly move it into new conditions (more on this in the future)!

How Do You Start Teaching Recall?

There are a lot of ways to start, so I am going to talk about how I started (or restarted) with Sully. 

As a reminder, before I did any training, Ben and I agreed on Ewok as our new cue (because I didn’t want to fight the history with the old cue). A part of my criteria for picking a new cue was that it had to delight me 😅. Then we agreed not to use her recall cue in real life yet to avoid “ruining it” before it’s even ready to dazzle. In the meantime, we’re leveraging long lines, drag lines, and informal prompts like kissy noises and “pup pup pup.” 

I chose to begin by doing something called a stimulus-stimulus pairing. Put simply, I’m creating an association between two stimuli: the word “Ewok” and treats. You may have heard this talked about in dog training as classical or pavlovian conditioning. 

Ewok → Treats

In this session, I simply said “Ewok” and then delivered treats (I did this about 15 times). She wasn’t required to do any behavior to get the treats. I delivered treats after I said “Ewok” 100% of the time regardless of what she was doing. 

In the Instagram post I shared on this session, someone asked a great question, “I noticed that [Sully] was constantly looking at you. If you [said] Ewok and she was looking some other way, would you still give her the treat??” The answer is YES. But this person’s keen observations hint at why this stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure can be a great place to start your recall training: BEHAVIOR IS HAPPENING. I am using this pairing procedure to help produce operant behavior (voluntary behavior that is increased or decreased as a function of its consequences). In future sessions, I will adjust how I am using the treats. Instead of treats being delivered every time after I say “Ewok,” they will be delivered after I say Ewok and she performs some aspect of the recall behavior. Because I hope to train errorlessly, it may not look all that different at first, but it will in time! 

The Secret Ingredient

Sometimes you hear people talk about using lower value treats in less distracting environments, but I am actually using the best stuff I’ve got in our first session. 

One of the things I do when I want something really high value is cook some ground beef in a skillet. That isn't a typical treat that we use, so the novelty adds some extra value!

Here’s why: Take away the idea of your recall cue for a moment, and just imagine how your dog might respond to you holding out the most delicious food for them to eat (maybe a nice big steak or piece of salmon). Are you envisioning your dog flying over to you with “enthusiasm” (aka more effort than needed since walking slowly would have worked too)? I want to bring THAT behavior and those emotions to our recall, and high value reinforcers help me with that. 

I cooked specially seasoned chicken and ground beef, and I asked Ben not to pull from those treat containers right now in everyday life because I want the boost in value that novelty can give reinforcers. (To be clear: I train her with food in her belly, and she still gets plenty of other high value treats in everyday life. I am not a fan of using deprivation generally speaking. I am simply using a treat that I wouldn’t otherwise make for her to take advantage of novelty’s effect.)

Questions From Our Community

I’ll try to pick a question from Instagram to highlight and answer in this section (or at least respond more thoroughly to … not sure “answer” is a fair word). I am basically thinking out loud here, so consider yourself warned lol! 

Question: “Thank you for another wonderful post! I'm struggling a little bit with the idea that you used the recall cue too many times when Sully couldn't perform the behavior - I understand how this could spoil the cue, but it also seems to me that the times when recall is most useful/important is in those difficult moments. My dog also finds the environment heavily reinforcing, with a high prey (or at least chase drive) and what appears to be an insatiable curiosity about everything! She has very good recall at the dog park, but I don't let her off-leash anywhere else, fearing that my recall cue might not work if she came across a wild animal that she wanted to investigate or chase. How do you determine if your recall cue is ready for these situations? Do you think it ever can be for a dog with such high interest in the environment?”

Answer: This is a GREAT question. Have you ever heard someone say that your dog needs to be able to recall 100% of the time (“have perfect recall”) before you let them off leash? 

But here’s the plot twist: While that old advice is meant to keep dogs and people and wildlife safe (or that’s my interpretation), I actually think the bigger threat comes from believing that any dog’s recall is 100%. I almost do the opposite of that old advice when I make a decision to let my dogs off leash: I assume my dogs will not recall. By making this assumption (or at least playing it out in my head), I can assess how big of a problem it would be in a given area if my dog blew a recall. If the risk to my dog and/or others is too high (and people will have different ways to evaluate risk and different risk tolerances), I don’t let my dog off. 

For example, my other dog, Otis, has GREAT recall. But I don’t let him off leash if we are near a busy road. That isn’t because I think he will fail a recall. It’s because I cannot predict the future with 100% certainty, and the consequences of a failed recall are way too dangerous in that setting. I’m flipping the lens a bit and instead of focusing first on how likely my dog is to recall, I’m first focusing on how problematic it would be in the area we occupy if my dog didn’t recall. This actually helps take a lot of the stress and uncertainty out of my decision because all of the weight isn’t on my dog to recall perfectly in that setting. 

Let’s chat about this point from the original question: “ … it also seems to me that the times when recall is most useful/important is in those difficult moments.” PREACH. I hear you loud and clear. This is what makes it so tricky to build recall. It also allows us to dive into the next decision layer with unclipping a leash. We have to have a pretty good understanding of our dog’s behavior and be able to read the environment well in order to make predictions. I would be remiss if I didn’t call out here that I have clearly failed at this since I am starting over 🤣. It’s so easy to blurt out your recall cue in a difficult moment and just cross your fingers that it works. 

As you are building the recall, you will butt up against this line a lot. I actually think it’s easier at the beginning of training because the line is a lot clearer - you can basically assume the dog is not ready for any real life tests yet. For right now with Sully, my rule is not to use her recall cue at all in real life. It gets harder the more training progresses because that line gets a bit blurrier. (I do think this is where my decision making process for unclipping a leash helps.)

Let’s chat about the next part of the question: “How do you determine if your recall cue is ready for these situations?”

This can be tricky, and there isn’t one right answer. To some degree, the human’s risk tolerance is a factor. I don’t think I have ever written this out before, so I don’t think this will be perfect … my confidence level stems from some combo of these things: 

1) My dog’s experience recalling under similar conditions.

In the course of training, I will systematically work in a variety of environments and with a variety of distractions. I will collect data (often in my head, but this time I hope to do it on paper) to help me determine what Sully is ready for. For a good long while, I will only use my recall cue when we are out and I want to get a recall rep in. I won’t likely use it in random, tough moments (I’ll accept that she may dip for a second and breathe knowing that I dropped the leash because I was okay with this happening here). I will only use my recall cue in real life when I think she has the learning history needed to respond by coming to me. I won’t be able to work directly with every tough distraction in controlled ways (e.g. deer), but I can set up similar conditions that I can control to work on recalling out of chase (like recalling off chasing a ball or a prey-like-toy on a flirt pole). If my dog has been able to recall mid-chase in a variety of contexts that I controlled, I have more confidence than I would otherwise (still not perfect) about recalling out of chasing other things in real life. If my dog has no experience recalling when they are mid-chase, I am not going to use a recall cue when they are chasing a squirrel. (More generally, I might also think about how many successful reps of recall my dog has done in total to gauge their overall R+ history. This is more relevant early on in the training journey.)

2) My dog’s past behavior around this distraction while on a long line. 

For certain tough distractions (like deer) that I can’t easily control, I may use real life moments when leashed to train and gauge my dog’s behavior. For example, I want to see a dog quickly and easily respond to me when they see a deer while leashed before I ever consider recalling them away from deer when off leash. I might even see a dog spot and deer and automatically orient to me, which is the first part of recall anyway! I might take a dog to a spot with squirrels where they can practice just watching them (rather than chasing). These types of experiences around tough distractions give me a lot more confidence about recalling away from them if/when the time comes. 

3) My dog’s offered behaviors.

This may not seem as obvious, but how my dog typically behaves in a given environment can contribute to my overall sense of confidence. For example, if my dogs have learned (generally) to stay on the trail, I may feel more confident than if they hiked by zooming around 100 yards off the trail. If my dogs auto-check in (aka stop and wait, look at me, and/or run back to me) as soon as they hit a certain radius from me on the trail, I might feel more confident than if they just keep running ahead. Right now, Otis’s typical trail behaviors inspire far more confidence than Sully’s. As soon as Otis gets about 20 yards away from me, he automatically stops or runs back to me. He is checking in all the time. Sully may walk for 45 minutes before she even looks at me 😂. Otis is essentially already performing the recall behavior - I would just have to add a cue in front of it. Most of the time, Sully isn’t offering any recall behavior (not even the initial components of it). I want to see pieces of that behavior showing up in the context of the environment before I try to cue it verbally. I will be working on offered check-ins on trails with Sully before I use her recall cue. (This can also give me info about whether my reinforcers are strong enough or not.)

4) Response checks. 

There are a range of simple behaviors I will use to gauge what’s going on with a dog on a given day and in a given environment. For example, I might cue a nose touch, sit, and paws up. If those are behaviors that my dog can reliably do in a range of environments, I would know something is up if suddenly they can’t do them or they perform them slower. With Sully, one of the behaviors I will always check is whether or not she can eat. If she isn’t enthusiastically taking a treat I drop for her (or isn’t then looking up at me to ask for another), that is not a good sign about how motivated she’s likely to be to recall. Data like this can help me feel more confident in my choices.

5) Distant antecedents.

What has or hasn’t happened lately in my dog’s life that could influence their behavior or the strength of reinforcers? Here is a good example: We live near the woods and have a fenced back yard that Sully is able to patrol all day. When we stay at my sister’s house in Atlanta, she loses that activity for a week. When we come home, the deprivation can make her sniffy-hunty behaviors WAY more likely since the value of the associated reinforcers went up (because of the deprivation). So when we first return home, I hold her long line for a while and don’t recall her until she has her fill of nature again so my reinforcers can compete better with nature. 

I heard something from a conference a while back that may be helpful as a framework (I wish I could remember the speaker’s name and exactly what they said). Write out a list of environments that are easy, medium, and hard in terms of level of difficulty for a recall. For example, here are Sully’s: Living room (easy), empty field (medium), woods (hard). I have expanded on this a bit and actually have a list of easy’s, medium’s, and hard’s. Then write out a list of as many distractions that you might recall your dog away from as you can think of going from easy to hard. For example, at the bottom (easy) end of the list might be a jacket on the floor and at the top (hardest) of the list might be a screaming fox running away. There are a lot of distractions between those two. Then you can start working through the distractions somewhat systematically to build the learning history you want with them. This can give you some confidence you might not have otherwise and help you decide when to let your dog off leash.

Now to be fair, I only worked through certain distractions (like recalling away from wildlife, recalling away from food, etc.) super systematically with my dog, Otis. Otherwise, I got to be a bit loosey-goosey and focus on building a big R+ history in general while still being intentional about when I used my cue. With Sully, I am going to be WAY more systematic (hello data collection!) – in large part to set myself up for success since I have a history of inaccurately predicting whether or not she will recall (or just throwing out hail mary’s). 

Now to the final part of the question: “Do you think [recall] ever can be [ready for difficult moments] for a dog with such high interest in the environment?” To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t think I will ever trust Sully’s recall the way I trust Otis’s recall. She finds different things reinforcing than he does, and I have a harder time beating the environment with Sully. And I think that’s okay! I am going to make very different decisions about where Sully vs. Otis can be off leash. I still have safe ways to get her off leash time in fenced spaces and can use long drag lines in areas that are not-populated and very far from roads. There are MANY ways that I can work with some of her predatory behaviors, so I’m sure we will make progress. How that progress translates to my decision making is yet to be seen, but I have a hard time believing that I will ever feel as confident in her recall as I am in Otis’s. 

This leads me to a final closing thought. Sully is going to fail recalls during this training journey. While I am going to use an errorless teaching approach, failures and mistakes are a normal part of the process. As we progress and the recalls get harder, I am going to make mistakes in my predictions and call her in moments when she can’t recall. To some extent, those failed recalls give me really valuable data that inform my training and helps me sort out where our gaps are. I won’t be using her new recall in real life anytime soon, but when I do, I am going to have to give her a little bit of freedom in order to recall her (it’ll be freedom on a long drag line). It’s a tough thing to balance! 

 Stay tuned for more!