My daughter recently read a book called "Scout" about a pup they were training for rescue work. There was a little game in that book that they played with the young pup called "find". One of the kids would hide and have the puppy FIND them. When he did they would praise and give him a treat.

My daughter Bryona has been wanting to try this with zoe for weeks. Today I had the time so she talked me into it. She hid and I told Zoey "find Bryona". Zoe took off upstairs and found her hiding in my room. We did this a few times with Bryona finding a new place. But each time we played Zoe had to check the places she found Bryona first before she would try and sniff her out to find out where she was at that time. So each time we played it took longer and longer for her to find her. I doubt Zoe will ever qualify for rescue dog status but both dog and kid had a good time.

Sounds like a fun game

Hide and seek is a training tool/game used for years. I used to it with my first tri Basenji in the 70's. It works as an off leash tool to get your dog to look for you when your out somewhere. I play it now with my tri. A great training video for sight hounds is called "Really Reliable Recall" by Leslie Nelson. It has hide and seek as one of the games to play with your dog and gicing a treat when it finds you.

Good fun for the dog with training involved.
Good work!

I play a variation of that game … I hide and then use the dog whistle to call Gossy. Not only does she go looking for me the whistle part is great training to get her to come to me whenever I need her to.

We LOVE playing this game with our dogs…I can get Topaz to do a little Baroooo when she finds me lol lol silly dogs!

I believe this was one of THE most useful pieces of advice and games another dog owner had given us when it came to our puppy recall….

One day at the dog park I was talking to a man - owner of a Visla, about his dog recall and he went into a story about how his dog took off after a rabitt. He made a game of it and decided to hide on his dog, in which it took his dog 30 minutes to find it's owner and since that day his dog obeys his recall.

We are lucky enough to to live in a building where there is an underground car park that is capable of holding 100 cars, but in our case there's only 6 cars, so we always play hide and seek on our B, especially after walks when his recall was poor. And because of playing this game, we have a dog that will come to us 80% of the time. We are still working on the 20%, but I'm happy that at 8 months he comes to us when we're out of site at the enclosed dog park.

Now, if only I can trap a squirrel in the car park and put Kairoe to the test! lol. j/k [kind of] :o