When it comes to adolescence, recall is often one of the most challenging aspects. In addition to training your usual recall cue, it can help to have a backup that your dog loves responding to.

One option could be to train your dog the counting recall, as inspired by Chirag Patel. This is where you count out treats to the ground one at a time as you say 1,2,3, 4 and so on.

At first your dog won’t realize what you are doing, but when they notice that there are treats on the floor they will come running over. Praise and let them eat the food off the ground.

Move away and start counting out treats again.

As you practice this your dog will get quicker and quicker at responding and you’ll only have the chance to count to a lower number.

The reason this works really well is that it is unconditional. You are counting out treats to the floor and your dog knows that whenever they hear the game start, rewards can be found on the ground beside you. It doesn’t matter how quickly your dog comes back; they always get rewarded in this game.

You will want to start in a quiet area of your home or garden and when you have built up your dog’s response, take this game on the road to a variety of places.

With practice, in time you could even use the counting recall game to call your dog back when they are running away from you.