Perfect recall - how to get your gundog to return to your whistle

Picture the scene. You’ve spent the summer practicing retrieves and recall with your beloved gundog, and you’re excited to get out in the field and show off what a fabulously well-behaved dog you’ve got. The first drive arrives and neither you nor the dog can contain your excitement. Your faithful companion is so excited that when a runner hits the deck he charges off after it, your frantic whistles falling on deaf ears as your dog snaffles the bird, then does a lap of the shooting line in triumph.

After much red-faced shouting and blearing on your whistle, you eventually regain control, but upon your return to the gunbus, instead of being congratulated on your shooting, you face a barrage of ‘banter’ in reference to your dog’s disobedience, and an icy glare from the shoot captain or keeper. If you’d like to avoid that scenario, read on!

How to train recall in gundogs

I spoke to Ben Randall, champion gundog trainer and one of the brains behind the Gundog App, to get some tips on recall. “Recall is one of the most common problems with all breeds of dog, but especially for working breeds,” he told me. According to Ben, working dogs have a strong desire to do five things:  find it, chase it, catch it, kill it, eat it.

The trouble is, says Ben, when working dogs have mastered those skills, they have a tendency to develop a sixth desire: to not come back on the whistle. This means that the groundwork for great recall has to be done as early in the training process as possible. “Establishing recall as early as possible is key to building a good partnership with your dog,” says Ben. “From the day your puppy arrives at home, you need the sound of your whistle to always be a positive and rewarding noise for your dog.  Try to have this in your mindset whenever you use it.”

Establishing a positive recall (sowing the seeds)

A good way to put the idea into your dog’s head that the whistle is a positive thing is to use the whistle at every dog’s favourite time of day. Ben gives the following advice: “Every feed time, use  three or four recall ‘pips’ whilst preparing the food. Encouraging your puppy to follow you with the food in your hand and using pips on the whistle.  Your puppy will soon associate the sound with something positive and rewarding coming directly from you.”

Of course, it's not just puppies who might need a bit of recall training, and if you’re heading out in the field this season the chances are that you have a dog who’s a bit older. “Even with an older dog,” says Ben, “we need to find a motivation to encourage that dog to be around us and want to come back to us.” Again, mealtimes are a great situation to work on this, and then you can reinforce it in low-distraction environments around the home. Ben adds: “I like to reward after continued recall and continued sits.  This starts to build up the dog’s trust that if it keeps believing in me and keeps on working with me, the reward will come.”

By using these techniques in advance of the season, by the time you’re on the peg Ben reckons you should have a dog who actively wants to come back at the sound of the whistle.

Getting the lead back on

The final piece of the puzzle, and one that Ben says people often find a struggle, is getting the lead back on once the dog has performed a perfect (naturally) recall. Ben’s solution is once again to put the hours in at home. “I call the dog back to me and ask it to sit whilst showing the reward in my hand. I then put the lead on and then continue to walk with the dog at heel back to the house and reward the dog as and when.  So in the dogs mind, it’s thinking: “the quicker I recall, the quicker I sit, the quicker I allow the lead to come on, the better I walk to heel, my reward will come from the person I trust."

Help is at hand… or at least in your pocket

Training a gundog by yourself can be a tricky business, especially if you don’t have an expert around to help out when things don’t go according to plan. Gundog training groups on social media are awash with people seeking advice for troubleshooting issues that have arisen. Furthermore, arranging a training session with a specialist gundog trainer can be both expensive and inconvenient.

That’s where Ben’s Gundog App comes in handy (little German pun for you there. You’re welcome.) With a subscription to the app you can effectively take Ben with you on all your training sessions, making use of a huge library of training exercises and videos to guide you on your training journey. What’s more, through the app’s growing community you can submit queries, and the agile team will create new videos to help with the most common problems and to answer the most frequently asked questions.

Get a 7 day free trial of The Gundog App.