two year old border collie aussie mix who had functionally bombproof recall from month five through month eighteen in our former suburban neighborhood and has become meaningfully less reliable in the four months since we moved to a rural property with regular deer and rabbit traffic, the recall is not gone and is degrading in a pattern that worries me, looking for families and trainers who have walked the suburban to rural transition with high prey drive dogs and can tell me whether this is normal regression that requires patience or structural failure that needs immediate structured intervention

Atticus is a two year old border collie aussie mix we got at ten weeks from a working line breeder in our former suburban region. We did the recall work the way the published protocols and our local trainer suggested, started with the long line and the high value reinforcement protocol from week twelve, moved to the off leash work in controlled spaces by month six, built the recall through a hundred plus reinforcement sessions across the first year of his life, and by month eighteen he had a recall i would have described to a stranger as bombproof, he came back from squirrels in the backyard, came back from joggers passing on the sidewalk, came back from other dogs at the local off leash field, came back from food on the ground at outdoor cafes. The recall was the thing i was most proud of in his training and was the thing i used as evidence to myself that the foundation work pays off. Four months ago we sold the suburban house and moved to a fifteen acre rural property with woodland on three sides and the recall i had built over eighteen months has degraded across the four months in a pattern that has gotten worse rather than stabilizing, and i am trying to figure out what i am actually watching.

What the degradation looks like in concrete terms because the published material talks about recall regression in generic ways and the specifics matter for understanding what to do. The recall on the property when no wildlife is present is still solid, he comes back from sniffing in the yard, comes back from moving through the woodland edge, comes back when called from any location within reasonable hearing distance, this part of the recall is intact. The recall when wildlife is present is the part that has degraded, and the degradation has been progressive rather than stable. Month one on the property he would respond to recall during a deer sighting after a three to five second delay, which felt acceptable to me even if it was a regression from the suburban performance. Month two the delay extended to ten to fifteen seconds and i started seeing some episodes where he would commit to a brief pursuit before responding to the recall and breaking off. Month three the pursuit episodes became more frequent and the duration of the pursuits before the recall response extended to thirty to forty seconds, and i had two episodes where he disappeared into the woodland for two to three minutes before returning on his own without responding to the recall during the time he was out of sight. Month four the recall during wildlife presence is at the point where i no longer trust it, the pursuit episodes are now the default response to deer sightings and the recall is responded to only after the dog has decided to disengage on his own terms, which is functionally not a recall at all.

What i have done so far that has not produced the result i hoped for. I doubled the reinforcement value for recall in the rural environment, went from high value treats to chicken from the bone and freshly cooked steak strips at the recall point, the reinforcement worked when wildlife was not present and made no measurable difference when wildlife was present. I added a remote recall trainer system with a vibration and tone signal as a pre cue before the verbal recall, on the theory that he might be missing the verbal cue at distance, this has not changed the wildlife response pattern. I went back to long line work for thirty minutes daily to rebuild the foundation in the new environment, which has felt productive at the conceptual level and has not transferred to the off leash wildlife scenarios. I consulted with the trainer we worked with through his foundational work who has not seen the rural environment cases and gave me general advice about reinforcement value and distance work that i was already doing. I have not yet brought in a trainer who specializes in this transition because i did not know who to find and because i was hoping the work i was doing would produce a corner that it has not produced.

The specific questions i am bringing to this thread because the published material has not given me clear answers and i need calibrated information from people who have walked this. One, the recognition question, what is actually happening here, is the recall breaking in a fundamental way because the prey rich environment has overridden the foundation work or is the recall in a temporary regression because the new environment has reset the reinforcement history and needs to be rebuilt from a partial reset point, the framing matters for what the right intervention looks like. Two, the trajectory question, in families who have walked the suburban to rural transition with high drive dogs, what did the recall arc look like across the first six to twelve months on the new property, did the dogs eventually rebuild a recall that is reliable around wildlife or did the rural recall always have an asterisk on it that the suburban recall did not have, and what was the cost of getting to whatever endpoint was achievable. Three, the intervention question, what does the structured rebuild actually look like in the rural environment, what specifically does the family do in week one and week four and week twelve to address the wildlife specific failure mode, the generic recall protocols are not addressing what i am seeing and i need the protocol that is calibrated to the prey rich rural environment. Four, the management question, in the period while the rebuild is in progress, how do families manage the dog on the property safely, the gps tracker is the floor of what we have implemented and i am wondering whether i need to be moving to long line management on the property until the recall is at a defensible level, which is operationally a significant change for a property that we partly bought for the off leash freedom it would provide. Five, the structural question, is there a version of this where the breed and the environment are not compatible in the way i thought they would be, the working line border collie heritage is part of why we picked the breeder we did and the prey drive that has surfaced in the rural environment is in some sense the breed working as designed, are there families who have concluded that the working line dog in the prey rich environment requires a structurally different management approach than the off leash freedom model i had pictured, and if so what does that approach look like in practice.

One last contextual piece because the family side matters for the response. We have two young kids who are six and eight and who have grown into a relationship with Atticus across the eighteen months he had reliable recall, the safety of off leash time with him in the woodland was part of what we pictured the rural property providing for them and the regression has changed what the daily reality with the dog looks like for the kids. The kids have noticed and have asked questions and the family conversation about whether Atticus can be off leash with them in the woodland is one we are actively having and one that the published material has not equipped us to have well. Looking for the version of this that recognizes the family stakes alongside the training mechanics and that can tell me what families in this situation have actually done