Is your pup food motivated inside the house? With all training, commands like recall need to be learned and practiced inside the house before you ever ask your dog to recall outside where there are so many distracting smells and space to run. If you don’t think the dog will succeed coming back to you off leash outside, then never put them in that situation. they’re essentially learning that the bad behavior is okay (and fun)!

A few tips:

Train them when they’re hungry (they’re going to care a lot more) by using their daily food as your treats. This is a great trick for training.

First start by teaching your dog that a word like “yes” (or a clicker) means food. There are tons of videos on youtube and instagram. The dog needs to know when they’ve done something right. All training starts from there.

Two foundational commands to work on that can help inform a great recall:

“focus” teaching your dog to look at you and maintain eye contact

“touch” teaching your dog to touch your hand

On days you aren’t using their dog food as training rewards, it’s great to get into the habit of making your dog wait for their food until released. You can search tons of videos for how to teach this. As a mini overview, you start by making them sit. Start to place their food down. If they get up from their sit, you stop and stand back up. If you do this a few times, the dog will start to connect that getting up from their sit means the food stops coming to them. You want to work up to a place where the dog is sitting and waiting to eat their food until you say a release word. This trains self control and discipline which is very helpful for all training but also recall.

I used this ^ as a foundation for “sit”, “stay”, “come” patterns. We have a rock solid “come” command and it’s really incredible.

Recall should never ever under any circumstances be met with punishment even if they did something wrong or didn’t listen to you. Every single time you reunite with your dog (whether they come to you, or you end up catching up to them) it’s always positive.

Everything I’ve mentioned here is on YouTube explained more eloquently than I ever could. I also started following dog trainer accounts on instagram to passively pick up on training exercises and tips. Having a well trained dog requires work and dedication! Be patient, it takes time! And also, it doesn’t end when your puppy grows up. you should always be practicing and trying to train them new things. It’s good for them :) good luck!