SAFETY

NO DOG IS 100% TRAINED OFF LEASH!!!

No dog is 100-percent trained off leash, according to Clarissa Fallis in her article “An Off Leash Walk Ended in Tragedy for My Dog, and I Was Powerless to Stop It.”

Fallis, a dog behaviorist and trainer, lost her own well-trained dog when he decided to run across a busy street because he heard another dog. This was a first for him, but it would also be his last.

Are a few minutes of off leash time worth your dog’s life?”

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CARISSA FALLIS’S STORY: “It was midday on Jan. 16 when my dog suddenly and tragically passed away. I had let him outside, getting ready to go on a walk in my backyard. I’m a dog trainer, and Lynal and I had gone through this routine a thousand times. But this day was different.

I kiss Lynal the first time I brought him home, in December 2010.

At the front of my house was a fairly busy street; on the other side was a huge orchard. Someone was walking a dog on the other side of the street — and although we had seen this before, Lynal was suddenly determined to meet this particular dog. He let out what would soon be his last Beagle howl and darted toward the road.

I called out every recall word I had for him and even threw in his favorite word, “cookie.” It didn’t work. I watched in horror as a gasoline truck ran him over. In an instant, he was dead.
“Wasn’t he trained?”

The most common responses I get when I tell this story to my clients is, “Didn’t he know ‘come’? Wasn’t he trained? What went wrong?”

The answer is yes, he did know “come.” Yes, he was trained. And what went wrong was a judgment on my part.

Lynal was a psychiatric service dog, performed search and rescue, and was competent in competitive obedience. We had taken classes such as “Really Reliable Recall” and learned a recall word on a response collar. In other words, Lynal was very well trained. But I learned a lesson that tragic day in January about dogs, recalls, and training that I will never forget. The fact is, no dog can ever be 100-percent trained.”