• We always followed 'nothing in life is free' training. Playtime off-lead was definitely a reward. Start small, train him to pay attention to you first and begin to ignore other stimuli. After that, recall and freeze. I think once you've trained your dog to focus on you, everything else is a lot easier. The most important thing was absolute consistency, so if you've got a dog walker - give them specific instructions. It'll all work out, you just need to be patient. I'd also highly recommend taking some time to learn about dog body language. Dogs are mostly mostly predictable and being confident in knowing what's happening reduces stress, both for you and pup!

    Oh...last thing. By keeping letting dogs do stuff you don't want, it makes it tougher to train them not to do those things. If a dog pulls on the lead, stop walking. If they don't recall, put them back on the lead. Dogs need to be dependent on you (the boss) for instruction. They're much happier that way.

  • This all makes sense and mostly reflects what we've been trying to do with her. It's definitely noticeable that the things we let her get away with to start with are things that we're struggling with now. It's nothing major but just things like getting up on the sofa whenever she fancies, even if she's covered in mud.

  • Start small, train him to pay attention to you first and begin to ignore other stimuli. After that, recall and freeze. I think once you've trained your dog to focus on you, everything else is a lot easier.

    Any further advice/recommended approach on the attention bit? I think we’re 80% there on the recall but when we’ve lost his attention we just have to wait it out.

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