One of the most common questions I am asked is: “how do I get my dog to come when called?”.
Teaching your dog to come is a step that challenges many dog owners.
In the television series, think about how difficult it was for Lassie to get anyone to follow her someplace! How did she say “come with me now”?
At any age older than four months, if your puppy or dog never learned to follow (a key element of our Puppy Head Start Program), it is most likely that what he has learned instead is how to ignore you or run off! It seems that the more you try to pull him closer the more he tries to leave!
This will only get worse if you never learn how to train your dog in complete obedience to include following, not pulling, stay, and many more impulse control behaviors and English language words!
But that is another lesson entirely…
There are several techniques that work together in getting your dog to come to you. Keep in mind getting your dogs attention is a must at first, so visuals and noises will go hand-in-hand in getting your dog started towards you.
Then we will be paring the words “Fluffy come!” with the action over and over again to ultimately program your dogs muscle memory to respond to that word request gleefully!
