For a very good guide to all sorts of dog training processes and dog behavior challenges, I use and recommend Clickertraining ...that link goes to the description of this terrific ebook you download immediately, wherever you are! -- Rosana

There is a lot that can be said about training a dog to come when called, and I’ve written about it before, but in this article I am going to focus on something I just learned from Patricia McConnell’s excellent book, For the Love of a Dog, which I review here.

She writes quite a lot in this book about the many ways that dogs and humans can misunderstand each other. One example often takes place when people are calling their dogs to come to them — the recall is a term often used to describe this.

She says it so well, I will quote a bit: Read the rest of this entry

I’m really stoked by how dog trainer Leslie Nelson gets dogs to come when called — reliably! Her methods have saved some lives already and I’m sure will save a lot more. I wrote an article for the site called Teach Your Dog a Really Reliable Recall and also did a page on Nelson’s Really Reliable Recall DVD. (She’s done a booklet too, and it’s mentioned on that page.)

You can use her methods with a dog of any age, with any established habits. It will take more time in some cases, but it’s really worth the trouble. Poignantly, a couple of days after I did those pages, I was surfing the net, for once not even with dogs on my mind, when I came across a sad blog entry in Australia, by a woman whose dog had been killed by a car a few days before. I can’t even type this without tears coming to my eyes. Our dogs are so precious, they give us so much! Here is something we can do to make their lives safer.