Agility Training for Dogs New Haven CT

The badge of honor for many trainers is a highly reliable recall. It can take hours and hours of painstaking foundation work and training with distractions before finally reaching the Holy Grail of recall training: distance and distractions. I was pretty smug. Sandy Mae repeatedly came when called from distances of more than 200 feet from distractions such as horse dung (a delicacy to her) and fast-food wrappers (second only to horse dung).

I was glad her recall was so solid because she appeared to be increasingly distracted, often wandering off in the opposite direction. Although she came with great enthusiasm and speed each time I called (for which I generously rewarded her), it was getting tedious calling her all the time to keep her with me and the other dogs. She was driving me to distraction!

One day I watched as she turned around and retraced our route. What was so interesting back there? She trotted about 100 feet out, slowed down, and turned to look at me. It was clear from her expression: “Well, aren’t you going to call me?”

Sandy Mae had trained me very well without me realizing it. In my eagerness to keep adding distance to our awesome recall, I always called her from farther and farther. I had actually been rewarding a “behavior chain.”

A behavior chain is when two or more individual behaviors are linked together to form a new behavior, typically rewarded when the last link is performed. Sandy’s behavior chain was 1) run a distance away and 2) come ...

Author: Terry Long

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