I live in on an island in the Outer Hebrides with my dogs in an expansive rural area. My dogs are two Border Collies Bobby aged 11 and Ollie 7 and Freddie, a working line 9 month old Labrador who I’m training as my next Stooge dog to help me in dog training sessions I do with customers.
All three are well trained, as they should be, as with all dog trainers, they are our ‘shop window’ really. My dogs have good recall so walk off lead if we are off road, away from traffic and if we are the only people about.
However, my 11 year old Border Collie is showing signs of deafness and my young Labrador benefits from all the training he can get. We train though short games, play and during our daily adventure walks. Also, the big factor is where we live, the wind can be so strong and we live by a sea loch, which can be surprisingly noisy in wild winter weather, and we go out in ALL WEATHER.
My dogs are trained with verbal cues (commands) and hand signals, however you can imagine these fall short on a windy day when the dogs are running way ahead but I need to recall them. I found I was shouting them to recall too much and it was really hurting my throat..
So I decided to train my dogs to recall to a whistle. This went well and is now their regular call back. I had taught all my dogs the verbal cue and arm signal for stop and drop anyway, but as Fred was going to be my new stooge dog, I wanted him to be trained to ‘stop & drop’ from a distance on a whistle.
With any cue you teach a dog, it has the same principles, repeat it (keep sessions short though) gradually increasing Distance, Duration and Distractions, making it as easy as possible. I started 10 days ago by overlaying the whistle tone I chose (a long continuous tone) with the verbal and arm signal cue he knows. Today he was able to stop and drop on the whistle with just the arm cue. He was at a very close distance with minimal distraction, so the plan is to keep practising it where he finds it easiest, remove the arm cue then gradually increase distance and distraction. I am updating my Instagram page now and again with our progress (ann_spogan_dogtrainer), so anyone interested can see how someone else has done it. What really helps me train Freddie is that I have ‘primed ‘ his beautiful brain with calming around the home exercises, I do this with all my dogs and it makes a huge benefit to their behaviour, it improves their focus, impulse control, controls arousal levels and boosts their security, boundaries and confidence. I believe ALL dogs should do this before they undergo any training, I believe without it, training a dog is so much harder and may not work. Think of this – you sand and priming a beautiful piece of furniture before you paint it for a lovely result, if you want the lovey result, you do the prime work, if you don’t do it, you have a not so good result.. And before any Negative Nellies think this.. I AM NOT comparing a precious dog to a bit of furniture, it’s just an analogy to make my point.. I put everything I did with my own dogs for calming around the home into an information document for some of my customers with reactive, boisterous, nervous or excitable dogs, I then built it into a 4 week course format, which is available to join monthly from May 2025.
DAY 1
DAY 10