Just about every morning, I take Cabana to a nearby park that allows dogs off-leash during certain hours. The park consists of 18 acres of fields which are also used for soccer, baseball, and softball. Over the past two years and a half years, Cabana and I have made wonderful friends, both human and canine, with the folks who show up at the same time every day, and together, we walk as a pack, back and forth along the back fence of the fields. Our walking keeps the dogs walking, so we all get exercise. Meanwhile, the humans chat with each other and throw Chuck-Its for the dogs that like to retrieve. Other dogs romp around with one another or just sniff the gopher holes, which are abundant. Our time at the park is something I look forward to every day, rain or shine.
The problem is that Cabana is not a ball dog or a gopher hole sniffing dog. She will retrieve the ball 3-5 times, but even if I reward her every time she brings the ball back to me, she loses interest. What she likes to do instead is WANDER. She has learned that she sometimes finds yummy morsels when she's off by herself--a bag of chips left behind from a kid's lunch, dropped peanuts from a baseball player, maybe even some rabbit droppings. Even when her favorite dog friends are there, like Maggie (the English Springer Spaniel) or Bodhi (the Blue Picardy Spaniel), she will romp around with them for a while, but sometimes, she will still wander off.
The park is about 90% fenced, so I'm not too concerned about Cabana getting lost. It's more that it's an inconvenience for me and a bad habit for her. I've tried to show in the photos what a big field this is and how far away from me Cabana can be. When she's just a few yards away, she's very good about coming when I call her. But if she wanders a bit too far, she blows me off completely. I call her name, TRYING not to use "come" unless I'm sure she's going obey (though I've blown it many times and used the word when I shouldn't have). When she does come, I reward her with a treat and praise. But she will immediately start to wander off again. Sometimes, I feel like I have to call her over to me every 15 seconds. I can't have a conversation with anyone or lose track of her for even a minute, or she will have taken off.
Part of it, I'm sure, is that Cabana has figured out that if she wanders off and I call her, she gets a treat, so she has made it into a manipulative game. But if that was truly the case, she would come every time when I call her--but she doesn't.
I have tried many different tactics to stop the wandering. If she wanders and doesn't respond when I call her, I go to her and leash her for a while, so she loses her freedom as a consequence. I've tried different kinds of treats for the recall. I've tried recalling with a whistle. A friend even lent me an e-collar for a week, which actually worked very well (I only needed the vibrate mode), but I still have mixed feelings about getting one myself. I guess I could leash her the whole time we're at the park, but that sort of defeats the purpose of being there. I have also tried waiting her out, not calling her at all, and waiting to see if she will ever come back to me on her own. This does not work at all--she eventually ends up heading over to the parking lot or leaving the fields altogether and poking around in neighboring yards. She's just not a stick-to-your-side kind of dog--she's very independent, and it would probably take hours for her to even miss me or wonder where I am.
As I write this post, I'm thinking of the definition of crazy--it's a person who does the same thing wrong over and over, but expects a different outcome each time. I think that's what I'm doing. I need to think differently about this wandering issue, but I can't seem to see the situation clearly while I'm in it. Any advice from an onlooker's perspective?
Read more...
