An Opinion Post by Aly MacDonald, Precious Pooch Owner and Manager
Why Call Words are Important
There was once a whoodle named Taco, and as a puppy he was a wild child, a combination of too much energy and curiosity. He was so difficult, in fact, that when he first joined the pack I was doubtful of his ability to assimilate. Because our hikes are largely off-leash excursions, participants must have reliable recall, and his was frankly horrible. When I communicated my concerns to his mother, she explained to me that her pup hadn’t actually been trained to respond to the word “come.”
Apparently, he was picky about treats, and responded only to meat, specifically hotdogs. So, to bring him to heel, his mother wouldn’t give him a command but rather offer his favorite snack. His call word therefore became “hotdog.”
“Taco!” I found myself yelling thereafter, straining to see him through the leaves of the trees, “Hotdog!”
What’s the problem with this, you ask? The most obvious is that screaming “hotdog” in the woods makes it appear to others that you’re having a mental health crisis. To the average person, voluntarily wandering the woods surrounded by muddy canines already makes a person seem crazy—add to it that they also have an apparently desperate hunger for pulverized meat in a skin casing, and strangers will give this lunatic a wide berth.
The real problem, however, is that if your call word is an offering of reward, you’re not truly communicating a command. When training a pooch, the first thing we must do is impart to the pooch that the sounds coming from our mouths carry meaning, and what’s more, the meanings carry commands. Sit, stay, drop it. Down, Taco! No jump! This is all just nonsense to the dog until you make them understand what each syllable signifies. Imagine how strange all of this is to a puppy. A hairless biped you just met is snapping sharp, incomprehensible barks at you from five feet up in the air, and while you know it wants something, you have no idea what and hey—there’s an amazing smell coming from under this piece of furniture.
Professional trainers often point out that dogs respond best to language that is clear and consistent. When teaching your pup to “stay,” you must first show them the desired action, and then introduce the word as an association—and always use that exact word. This may sound obvious, but think of how often you naturally change your wording when communicating ideas. One day you say, “Taco, stay,” but then the next you say, “Taco, you stay there.” This is a tiny shift, clearly comprehensible to any native English speaker. But your dog is not one of those, and “stay” and “you stay there” are actually totally different sounds, possibly different commands to the pup who learned just yesterday what you meant when you said the first thing.
In my opinion, a lot of training is eradicated with these tiny mistakes, and often we don’t even know we’re making them. Our language is so intelligible to us that we just don’t think about how it could be misinterpreted, but really the command “sit” is markedly different from “sit down,” and even farther from “Can you just sit and be a good boy while mummy drinks this margarita?”
Which brings me back to the most important command: the call word. A call word is the command you use to get your dog to return to you. Tried and true is “come,” the one used by most trainers. You’ll also hear “here,” “heel,” and “to me,” but I think K7 had it right when they sang, Come, baby, come, baby, baby, come, come. (Ah, back when music really meant something.)
Not only was Taco’s call word unusual, but it was not a command at all, but rather an offering. So, to Taco, who was happy enough sniffing stale pee on this tree, learning that you had a hotdog in your possession was of no consequence at that moment. When I yelled, “hotdog,” I was not explaining that I wanted him to approach me, but rather telling him what I had and allowing him to make the choice. After realizing that “hotdog” only slightly improved his recall, I started from scratch with his training, and so when he was with the pack, I reinforced the “come” command. Being a smart pooch, he caught on quickly.
Roc-KAAAAAAAAAY
There was another pack dog, Rocky, whose mother used the strangest commands. He had a penchant for grabbing his leash and tugging on it when he was feeling frisky, and her command for “drop it” was to yell “Excuse me?!” in a horrified tone. This led to several awkward encounters with strangers on the sidewalk, but Rocky’s call word was actually worse, because instead of “come,” she had trained him to respond only to his name shrieked at an insane volume and with an odd accent, “Roc-KAAAAAAAAAAY.” Now, this worked better than “hotdog,” because this pronunciation of his call word was consistent and clearly a command, not an offer of reward, but it was just weird. So at one point in my life, I spent days on end deep in the woods screaming, as though having some kind of acid flashback, “Roc-kaaaaaaaaaaaaay! Taco! Hotdog!”
All this to say that as long as the command is consistent, succinct, and clearly directional, your call word could be anything at all, but please, for the love of your future dogwalker, train your dog to “come.”
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