E-collar training – Dog not obeying commands fully in new environment
Hi all, My springer spaniel has been professionally trained on the e-collar for several years now. Lately we have had a couple of odd occurrences, and I am looking for some advice from those with experience. We moved house recently, and this has only started happening in the new environments.
We are training with a mini e-collar in continuous mode (aka the mini educator) for the following:
Heel – if she breaks heel, we use the continuous button; she will go back into heel.
Recall – When we call her back, if she does and remembers, we will praise her; if not, we will use the e-collar and yell at her again. This worked perfectly until recently.
This is used both on lead and off lead.
Now a couple of things have happened recently.
First of all, she didn't come back when called, so we pushed the button, but she just stared at us. Prior to calling her into heel, she was sniffing at something unknown in the grass, which she seemed very focused on. Once I stopped, she started to itch. Does this mean my number wasn’t high enough for that particular environment? and what should i do to get her to come to me. Strangely this has only happened a couple of times, before she had PERFECT recall.
Second thing: If she breaks the heel and i use my controller and she doesn't come back, what do i do next? She’d been trained to heel when the button was pressed. Now this has only happened a couple of times, and I think it's because my number was too low on the remote, but I am also scared of going up in case I scare her or hurt her somehow.
any advice would be great.