Recall: the command your shoot day depends on

A dog you cannot call back is a dog that cannot be let off the lead, and a dog that spends its life on a slip lead is not really a working dog at all. With the grouse season opening on 12 August and the first partridge days behind it, the keeper, the picking-up team and the beating line all have the same fortnight to fix a recall that has drifted. A new step-by-step guide from Gundog Journal, published this week, sets out how the command is built from puppyhood and how it is rebuilt when it has broken down.

Why does recall collapse just when the season needs it?

Because running off has become more rewarding than coming back, not because the dog has turned disobedient. The guide describes the classic pattern: excellent in a young puppy with nowhere else to be, decent through adolescence, then abruptly worthless the week the dog works out it can outrun its handler.

One spaniel in the guide had faultless recall until she was a teenager. On a morning when she had already had a good walk off the lead and was almost back at the house, she took off and led her handler a merry dance for 20 minutes, switching between pheasants, partridges, hares and muntjac in a game-rich area. Whistled at, she looked straight through her owner as though he were not there. She gave herself up only when she overheated and waded into a pond.

What happens next matters more than the chase. Punishing a dog at the end of an escapade teaches it that giving itself up is what gets punished, so however you feel, the dog that finally comes back has to be welcomed.

What counts as a high-value reward?

Something the dog would genuinely change its plans for: bacon cubes, chicken or scraps of hot gammon rather than crumbled dog biscuit, which is not competing with anything. The trainer Lez Graham, quoted in the guide from The Pet Gundog: a Common Sense Approach to Dog Training, puts it plainly: “always use high-value treats. When you give your dog a food reward, give a treat with one hand and stroke him with the other.” Pairing food with contact is what allows the food to be faded to random rewards later, rather than to nothing.

How is a recall proofed against live game?

In stages, and on a long line before it is tested for real. The guide teaches the name first in very short sessions indoors, then moves outside with the reward in the pocket, calling and rewarding while the puppy is still close and stopping while it still wants more. Distance is added a few yards at a time, with a treat every time at that stage. The whistle goes on top of an established recall, several sharp pips blown at the moment of the call until the whistle carries the meaning the voice already had.

Only then come the distractions: other dogs, birds, walkers and interesting ground, introduced deliberately while the long line is still on, so no command is issued that cannot be backed up. Two habits do the rest. Never walk out to the dog and then reward it, because the reward is for coming to you. And call the dog in for reasons other than going home, rewarding it and sending it off again several times on every walk.

What about the dog that is perfect on the lead and hopeless off it?

That is a different problem with a different answer. A dog of 17 months or so that walks to heel, sits on the whistle and is steady on the lead, then becomes another animal the moment it is released, is obedient because it has no alternative rather than because it wants to please. The retraining runs counter to instinct: use a space where the dog can be off the lead but cannot get away, a narrow exercise run of roughly 10ft by 60ft, give it complete freedom and ignore it entirely while it is away from you. Praise the moment it comes near, stop the instant it looks away, add a treat if it comes right in. After two or three weeks it will be seeking attention, and simple controls can go back on.

What happens next

Watch the season effect. Dogs that start beating or picking-up in the autumn frequently appear to go deaf, because live game switches the nose on to the point where the ears switch off; the answer is to go back to easy conditions and rebuild before the habit sets. Do not call when you know you will be ignored, since every ignored command teaches the dog that commands are optional. Beyond the shooting field, this is the command that stops a dog crossing a road or reaching a flock of sheep, which is worth every short, dull session it takes.