Maremmas are not renowned for their recall! Their independence and natural guarding instinct means that they
consider any commands before acting. Some Maremmas will consider a recall command to be an indication that there
is something happening that they should take notice of! Others will decide that as long as you are in sight of each other
recall is an unnecessary waste of energy....
If you have to rely on public spaces for off lead exercise please consider whether you can cope with a
dog that may never give a reliable recall. By that we mean immediate and consistent -
no matter what. Our dogs will come back - quickly on some occasions. But place them in a situation
where their guarding instincts kick in and nothing will tempt them back. To illustrate - on one occasion
we had three
of ours out after dark on a local (empty) field. We had barely seen the silhouettes of the two stray
dogs on the horizon before our three were across the field in hot pursuit. No amount of calling would've
got them back at that point - they saw a potential danger and were doing their job. They all did come back
within minutes (once the strays were across in the next county!) but had they seen people on the horizon as
threats - or encountered a road while in pursuit - well you get the picture....
So you need secure, safe spaces where you can exercise your dogs. You may also find that you can do creative "work arounds" for
recall. We discovered early on that Florence was far more reliable at stay than recall. So if there was a situation
where we wanted her back we would ask her to stay and then fetch her rather than asking for recall which might fail.
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Last updated January 2006
