My bouncy Cocker pup (18 weeks) has just discovered birds and all recall he used to have (reinforced from the first day with treats) has vanished in a flap of a little brown wing. Its his inner spaniel coming out quivering, barking and howling.

This is ok walking across well fenced fields, but sometimes there'll be livestock around or I might let the lead slip on the estate where I live and there are busy roads.

Any ideas on how to get the recall back?

Oh and any ideas on reducing the level of barking and howling in the bark garden at said birds would be helpful to me and my neighbours?

What's ok in a field isn't popular at home. He has only just started this, but if I could nip it in the bud whilst he's young that would be good. I don't expect to eliminate it as he's born to be excited at birds, but reducing it a bit would be helpful.

Cheers!

You need to keep her on an extention lead for a bit and when he starts to run after the birds call her back and loads of praise.
Some training classes will make her less jumpy and get him used to all sorts of sounds and noises. This may help with the barking as he could be anxious of all the strange things she is seeing.

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Grandma to Jinja Dog, Mum to Tilly the Cavalier, Tattycat, Moomy, Choo, Sonic, Niven Mc Twisp and Lawna the rabbits and 1 guinea,17 budgies, 4 Cockatiels, 8 Goldfish.

What are you trying with the pup now?

You will be confusing the hell out of your dog by allowing a behaviour for the same thing in one place and then it is not allowed to display the behaviour elsewhere. Is the dog allowed to bark or not? Once you have that question answered you can start training the wanted behaviour.

Your dog doesn't think: "I can bark here becasue there is no one about so I'll go for it and scream my head off" when it is in a field on grass and then think "I can't bark here because I might disturb people int he area" when it is in the garden, on grass.

Don't want barking - stop the barking everywhere.

Can bark in a filed - can bark everywhere.

Those are your two options to teach.

with recall go back to basics. start as if you never trained in the first place, jump up and down and flap your arms if you have to, make you the most appealing thing in the world for him to want to run to, if he doesn't respond, get down to his level. I have a cocker who is getting really good at recall but slips occaisonally so I start again. she's getting the message.

With the barking, I used a pet corrector for a while, then phased it out and introduced the cesar 'shhh' noise and it is working.

Good luck. please post a pic of your lovely Cocker. I love them!!! x

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Sammy, Always Forever in My Heart!

Love Hannah, Poppy & Lady xx

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I'm picking up a long lead this afternoon, then heading out with help to try attracting him with his favourite toy.

He just gets so excited he just doesn't notice treats.

I was also given the advice to try and walk him by lots of birds on a lead to get him used to them, but I'm not sure about this. I made sure he was used to lots of things such as birds early on, its just he's started to really notice and get excited by them now.

I understand what you mean about the barking and he not being able to differentiate between the two locations. I was just hoping to avoid neighbour problems.

I tried flapping, my brother found it hilarious, my pup found the red kite far more interesting.

build up your training adding in distractions slowly, I wouldn't just chuck him in with birds, spend a week or so practising recall every day then after that introduce the birds then... hopefully he'll learn to ignore them xxx

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Sammy, Always Forever in My Heart!

Love Hannah, Poppy & Lady xx

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Now also picking up a whistle along with my long line :Thanks!