ignores me My Puppy Ignores Me

[NickVernola]

Why does my 10 month old black lab ignore me sometimes? For example I’ll say come and she knows what that means but will just do whatever she was doing. 

[JMFS]

Kind of like a child, puppies will ignore you for more interesting things.  The trick is to be more interesting than the interesting things. For most of us, especially with Labs (I adore the breed!), that means waving our arms, making silly noises, or even running away from them to entice them to chase us instead of doing whatever it is they're doing.  Having a tasty snack at the ready always helps reinforce the idea that You are Way cooler than Anything they may be into at the moment.  By tasty I mean Real meat, cheese, or something else they go bonkers for.  Once their recall is solid you can scale back on the treats, but recall is something you will be forever training because dogs are dogs and they have noses and those noses lead them to massively enticing things and that's hard to compete with.

If we have steak I'll save a piece or two and use that to reinforce our recall (I cut it up into even smaller pieces for training).  I use a silent whistle myself so I'll set Gertie loose in the yard, let her get interested in something, then I'll blow our tune on the whistle and she comes Runnin', then gets her reward (omg steak!).  I do the same with chicken or even a hamburger or bacon (I go lightly on the pork products because Momo had a case of pancreatitis a few years back and his Veterinarian cautioned that pork is the least desirable meat for pooches).  Cut up hot dogs work, too.  Oh, or freeze dried beef liver - mine go wild for that.  Recall training gets the super special treats that I don't give out for anything else so it remains the Best thing in the World to come to me because it's a rare specialty.