Recall Issues with my English Setter Pup

[dirksmith]

Hi all. Hoping I may be able to get some advice from y’all regarding my English Setter pup. To give some background, our guy is just about 14 months old. He’s super sweet and quite smart, but also a generally anxious dog (working on medication) and physically sensitive (like many setters).

His recall outside is NOT good, particularly with my wife and other women (his dog care person is a woman), but also with me to a lesser extent.

For example, we bring him to our apartment complex dog park all the time to play fetch. He is obsessed with the ball and is very often laser focused on it. However, sometimes he will run into the wooded part of our dog park and finds sticks, dog poop, etc. to chomp on. It’s not great. At that point he no longer cares about the ball and only wants the object he knows he shouldn’t have.

“Leave it” doesn’t work. “Come” doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if we have another ball, another stick, super high value treats that he loves. He does not care because that stick or poop that he is chewing on is the highest value thing to him. If you approach him, he runs. If you “leave him” at the park and pretend to walk out or actually walk out, he doesn’t care. We’ve spent upwards of an hour trying to get him out of the park.

His “leave it” is pretty good in other situations. His “come” is generally not great unless we are in the middle of a designated training session inside. We are working on “come” inside without being in the midst of training.

The solutions we have come up with are as follows:

1. Longline (30ft) at the park and training recall that way, but it’s super easy for him to get tangled when playing and it’s a pain.
2. E-Collar. We have an e-collar for him and have started getting him used to wearing it. Again, he’s an anxious dog and physically sensitive. I know e-collars should not be used as punishment, but as a long distance communication tool of sorts, so we want to be really careful. We haven’t trained much with the stim at all because he is not a fan when I briefly tried it after watching several videos. I’d like to have him unfazed by the collar itself before really getting into turning it on.

I’d love any and all suggestions to remedy this anecdotal and from trainers alike. Do any of you have this problem? Do you use an e-collar and how have you acclimated a sensitive dog? If I’m thinking of this in the wrong way, let me know.

Our key goals here are (1) recall + leave it (2) being able to have him off leash in the future in a non-fenced area ex. hiking, tracking (he’s in a tracking class). Much appreciated!

EDIT: Lots of awesome advice here. Thanks all. When we eventually get to the point of the e-collar (I’m thinking it’ll be a few months down the line) any advice there? Thanks!!

 

[kreke]

@dirksmith You need to build a strong history of success. Only train when you are sure the recall will work. Put him on a long line to enforce the command when he is blowing it. Use high value rewards.

Build up from a low distraction environment slowly. A good recall needs a solid foundation of successfull repeats.

 

[dirksmith]

@kreke Can you explain “only train when you’re sure the recall will work”? That’s the issue, I’m never sure it’ll work haha.

 

[kamiaran]

@dirksmith You need to drop the e collar and make recalling MUCH easier. Practice restrained recalls in a hallway in your home. 3 foot recalls on lead. 10 foot recalls in your driveway. If you are not having 100% success in your hallway, don’t try a 3 foot recall outdoors.

You are making your life much harder by trying to take an adolescent gun dog to a park without a long line.

For every recall failure, you should put 100 successes in the bank. If you need to correct your dog, that is a failure and means that you have pushed too far.

 

[dirksmith]

@kamiaran This mostly makes sense. When you say “if you need to correct your dog that is a failure and means you have pushed too far” could you explain some more?