I was asked this question recently. I’ve rephrased it slightly to pull out the main points:
If a dog does go off on a wild hunt or chase how much reward do they get and how likely are they to repeat this behaviour despite training? If it does undo training, how can we progress training to prevent the problem?
It’s such a great question and one I get asked often. So I decided to write a blog about it. Scientists have been looking at this question since the 1950s so you are not alone if it is something you ponder too. In 1961, Keller and Marian Breland published a paper titled The Misbehavior of Organisms where they looked at the impact that instinctive behaviour like hunting and chasing has on training and they concluded that even if an animal’s instincts would prevent them from getting enough to eat, they will often perform instinctive behaviour.
The Brelands were trying to train animals to perform tricks. They were using food rewards that were given when the animals did something correct. Where things were going wrong during this training was that as the training progressed, the animal would have to try and figure out the next step so that they could get the food. During those gaps between getting pieces of food, the animals would start to look for other ways to get food. What they’d do was instinctive food finding. Chickens would scratch and pigs would use their noses to root at the ground. Those instinctive ways of trying to get food made way more sense to the animals than the task they were learning.
Once the animals had started to forage in an instinctive way, the trainers often found it impossible to get them back to learning whatever they were trying to teach. Instincts are powerful – and they have a strong impact on what animals do.
If you’ve ever stood in a field with a treat bag full of warm, roast meat or something else equally as delicious and had your dog ignore you as they chase something or follow their nose, you’ve seen the power of instincts – and will be able to understand the frustration that the Brelands felt.
I don’t want you to feel disheartened by the importance that prey drive has for your dog. There is loads you can do to stop it causing you problems. We’re going to talk about that toward the end of this blog. First, it’s important to help you understand just how much of a problem it is if your dog does take off on a wild hunt or chase.
Instincts and learning
Let’s start by looking at the role that instincts play in what your dog learns. A scientist called Ivan Pavlov is famous for uncovering this sort of learning – which is called classical conditioning. He was the man who discovered that if he rang a bell when he fed the dogs in his lab, after a while, when he rang the bell, his dogs would start to drool in anticipation of the food coming – even though there was no food nearby.
At first the bell was meaningless noise but over time, it became a reliable sign that food was coming – and when the dogs made that association, they would drool in anticipation.
The associations that your dog might have made about prey will play a part in whether or not your dog is likely to repeat running off. If you have an area near you where there are reliably squirrels then your dog may well associate that place with squirrels – whether there are any squirrels there or not.
When you are in that place, a wild hunt or chase is more likely than in other places – due to your dog’s association with that place and exciting squirrels.
Rewards and learning
Researchers discovered that there was more to learning than the instinctive learning that Pavlov wrote about. There is also conscious learning – often called operant conditioning. That sort of learning is what happens when animals act in some way and then as the result of their action, there is an outcome – sometimes called a consequence.
For instance, many dogs learn that if they wait until nobody is in the kitchen with them and then they can get up on the worktop, the consequence is usually finding something up there that is good to eat. The thing that sets it up – which scientists call the antecedent – is the dog being alone in the kitchen. The action – scientists call this the behaviour - is the dog getting up onto the worktop. The outcome – the consequence – is getting tasty food. This type of consequence is often called a reward.
We’re thinking here about how much wild chase/hunts might undo training. Answering that question for your dog depends on how good the reward was for your dog. You might have heard people describe it as being reinforcing. All that it means for something to be reinforcing is that the reward was good enough for the dog that they’ll repeat the action that got them it.
That’s what training tries to do. It tries to find a reward that makes the dog more likely to repeat something we want. With recall training, people work to find a reward that will mean that when they give the recall, their dog will coming running back to them as fast as they can. Whether or not that actually happens depends in large part on how important that reward is to the dog.
You can test out away from prey how important your normal rewards are to your dog. I’m going to use sit as an example here because most dogs know ‘sit’ but if your dog doesn’t, substitute anything they know how to do well in here.
All you need to do is ask them to sit and if they do, reward them with something you think they'll like. Try different sorts of food, games with toys, praise and affection. Over the course of a week or so, do your experiments. Ask your dog to sit 5 times in a row and after each one, give them one of your selected rewards. Stick with the same reward for all 5 sits. Make a note of how many times out of 5 they sit quickly. Then the next day, repeat that and use a different reward.
By the time you’ve repeated that with each of the rewards, you’ll have a really good idea of what rewards are better for your dog. The better rewards will keep them with you and have them sitting quickly and with the rewards they don’t like so much, they’ll probably wander off or sit much more slowly.
When you have that information, you’ll be in a much better position to do things like improve your dog’s recall. If you use rewards that your dog loves, then all your training will get better.
If you do try this out and want to talk about it, do email me and tell me about your results. I’d be fascinated to hear about it.
The role of life stage
How big a problem that wild chase or hunt is likely to become also depends on your dog’s life stage. This is a huge subject in itself so I’ll give you an overview here to help you start thinking about it.
Little baby puppies tend to stick quite close to the people who care for them. They know that they are vulnerable and most of them will stay near you. When a puppy is very young it’s a great time to have them off lead and to start offering brilliant rewards every time they are near you. That way you can start habits with your puppy that will pay off for their whole life.
Puppies don’t stay puppies for long at all and before you know it, they grow up into adolescent dogs. Typically somewhere between 5 months and 10 months of age is when that cute little puppy who followed you around everywhere changes. People describe as them pushing boundaries but they aren’t. They are growing up. Their bodies undergo enormous hormonal and neurological changes to get them ready to be adults. A normal part of that life stage is dogs exploring away from you and becoming intensely interested in making friends with every person and dog they see. Adult behaviours start to appear during adolescence too. That’s when you’ll start to see a prey drive in many dogs.
Being proactive to prevent problems developing is more important during adolescence than at any other time in a dog’s life. There are various ways of doing it. You can walk them in known places where there isn’t much prey. You can walk them on the lead. You can focus your outside time more on training than on going on walks.
You need to keep it up as well. With dogs we don’t really know when they come out of adolescence and become adult dogs. It’ll likely vary wildly from dog to dog and from breed to breed. My rule of thumb is that I consider my dogs to be adolescents until they are at least 2 years old. When I have a new dog, I observe them carefully for signs that they are starting to mature. For some dogs that will be way past 2 and for others, it might be younger. A couple of weeks of training won’t make your dog an adult. What you really need is going to be more than a year of being proactive and cautious.
Adult dogs are generally more stable in their behaviour. Unexpected things can and do happen with adult dogs but they tend to happen less often. Don’t give up on training your dog. There is a whole lot of reinforcement out in the world that will act to undo your training so expect to have to some training maintenance with your adult dog if you want to prevent that from happening.
Temperament Matters
Your dog’s temperament is going to matter as well in answering the question about how much a wild chase/hunt undoes your training. Breeding practices have in part attempted to produce dogs that look similar to other dogs of their breed – but that’s not all. Most breed standards will also include a description of what sort of temperament is wanted for that breed. Temperament is the part of your dog’s personality that they were born with so temperament is inherited just like coat colour.
From the UK kennel club’s website, the following is the description of an ideal temperament for an English Cocker Spaniel:
Gentle and affectionate, yet full of life and exuberance.
A Labrador Retriever is described like this:
Intelligent, keen and biddable, with a strong will to please. Kindly nature, with no trace of aggression or undue shyness.
In the UK at least, there is a saying among people who work those breeds as gundogs which reflects the description in their breed standard:
Labradors are born half trained and spaniels die half trained.
A huge research project was published in 2022 looking at temperament in thousands of dogs. When it comes to the question here about how much damage to training is done by one wild experience, two traits from that research are particularly interesting:
Environmental Interest: Dogs where that one wild chase/hunt will do the most damage to training are going to be the dogs with high environmental interest. For those dogs, the world around them is always going to have a strong pull on their attention and their training is going to be more likely to slip – and to take more work to rebuild.
Biddability: The other trait is this one that describes how likely dogs are to want to follow instructions from a person. The training of more biddable dogs is less likely to slip even if they do have a wild chase/hunt. Even if it did, it would be easy to rebuild.
The researchers found the 36% of Cocker spaniels in their research were biddable and 48% of Labradors were. The opposite trait of biddable is independent and they found that 44% of Cocker spaniels were independent along with 32% of Labradors. The rest of the dogs of those breeds in the research were somewhat in the middle between biddable and independent.
Moving onto the other trait that affects the training question, 50% of Cocker Spaniels were found to have a high level on interest in the environment and 42% were found to have a low level of interest in the environment – with the rest falling somewhere between. For Labradors it was 37% having a high level of interest compared to 39% having a low level of interest.
The research shows that there is some truth to the saying about those breeds. It also makes it clear that it is clearly quite likely you’d get a biddable Cocker Spaniel with low interest in the environment or an independent Labrador Retriever who has a high interest in the environment.
So – how much will a wild run/hunt/chase undo training?
Having covered all of the above, now we can talk about how much that wild moment is going to undo your training. The answer is that it will depend on your dog and on your individual set of circumstances. The association your dog has made through instinctive learning will play a part. Some dogs will make such a strong association that it will cause you problems and others just won’t. You can’t control the associations your dog is making but in general, the ideal situation for your dog to first encounter prey is when they are a puppy, when they are close to you – and you are ready to do something fun with your puppy where the prey is around. A less ideal situation is your dog encountering the prey for the first time during adolescence, when they are off lead and that is the time when the first wild run/hunt/chase happens.
Having said that, no matter what you will have training work to do if you have a high prey drive dog. It’s just that the less ideal situation will mean that your training will take longer and that any mistakes in training will take longer to recover from. But remember that taking longer is just taking longer – it doesn’t make your job impossible.
The training you’ve already done and the rewards you’ve already used will play a part too. Not only in helping your dog to make associations with doing fun things with you while prey is around but also in how likely your dog is to do the things you ask them to do. A dog with a long history of running back to their person and being rewarded well is going to have training that holds up way better than a dog with no training at all – or who has learned that when they run back sometimes their person is angry with them.
Life stage will play a huge part. In general, adolescence is the time when those wild chases have the most long term impact. They are less likely to happen at all with a baby puppy. Adult dogs are more likely to recover from them and go back to normal quickly.
Finally, the thing you have no control over once you have your dog is their temperament. Your dog’s temperament will play a huge part in the impact of those one off events. If you have a biddable dog who has low environmental interest, for sure they might chase a squirrel if it pops up in front of them but that’s not likely to cause you any long term problems. Whereas if you have an independent dog who has a high interest in the environment, that wild run/hunt/chase probably will take longer to recover from. It is important to be realistic that with some dogs, their temperament means that you are going to have to do more training and management than you would with a more easy going dog.
How to repair training after a wild run/hunt/chase
The first – and most important thing to do is to not beat yourself up. You didn’t deliberately send your dog off to do the wild chase. So don’t be mean to yourself about it. These things happen to even the most experienced and skilled trainers. These situations suck and you can feel bad about the situation – but don’t blame yourself.
Here’s what you can do to move on:
Look at where it happened and why. What sort of prey was it, what was the land like, what time of year was it, what weather. Understanding what the triggers were will help you to not be caught out in the same way again.
Take a few steps back – use more management for the next few days/weeks/months depending on individual dog.
During adolescence of one of my dogs, I stopped having him off lead in my local woods altogether for months. My local woods have a healthy deer population and the dogs encounter them often. During the summer we had been doing some off lead training carefully to try and help my dog become accustomed to the scent of deer without meeting actual deer. Then, when the vegetation died back, I stopped. I stopped because I didn’t want my young dog to develop a habit of chasing deer. In the winter the deer can be seen from a long distance AND their behaviour changes so that they become less likely to avoid small dogs like my dog.
The season of the year and behaviour of the deer makes wild chases more likely and I didn’t want to have to recover from them. So we mostly stayed out of the woods that winter.
The spring when the vegetation grow up is a much more supportive time of year to resume training. The deer aren’t as visible and they start to more actively avoid dogs. A small dog encountering a deer will lose sight of it quickly and – with a dog like mine who is scent focused, the dog is more likely to get distracted by sniffing where the deer was which also prevents chasing.
So sometimes you need to manage for a short time and sometimes you need to keep it up for longer while you wait for the season of the year to be better for your training needs.
Look for ways to offer alternatives or opportunities to help your dog meet their prey drive needs without having to run off. Remember that there is every chance that your dog’s ancestors were deliberately bred from in part because they had a high prey drive.
For many dogs, having opportunities to do the job they were originally bred for – or something similar to it – helps them to have a happy and satisfied life. That satisfaction means that they will be easier to live with and take on walks.
Become a really good person for your dog to hang out with. Pay attention to when your dog is doing things you like and make sure you reward them for it. If you did the experiment I talked about earlier to find out what things your dog finds rewarding, you’ll understand better what things your dog finds rewarding.
For sure, if your dog starts chasing squirrels, they probably won’t be interested in your rewards but if you spend more time rewarding them for hanging out with you, they’ll almost certainly chase squirrels less often.
Teaching your dog even the basics of self-control will help too. Can you you’re your dog back from chasing a ball? Or stop them joining in with chasing the balls that are thrown for other dogs in the park? Can your dog sit and wait while you throw a ball for them? If the answer to any of those is ‘no’, start teaching those skills. If you don’t know how, recruit a good dog trainer who will be able to help you.
If your confidence has been dented by your dog’s wild hunt or chase, do spend time working on your mindset as well. Success in training dogs is more about your mindset than anything else and it’s important to work on it. I have a mindset journal specifically for people training high prey drive dogs. It'll help you to stay consistent with your training after wild chase/hunt incidents.
These six repairs will help you and your dog to build solid habits that will help your dog get better at consistently making better choices. Habits are really the gold standard when it comes to dog training and that’s the case because everything else needs your dog to be able to think and make a choice. Their ability to think and make choices degrades when prey is around. Not only that but self-control is a limited resource for dogs. Dog having to exert self-control get tired because it takes up so much mental energy. When they get tired and their energy for controlling themselves runs out, then they tend to make poor choices – even putting themselves at risk.
Whereas habits require almost no mental energy at all. They happen on autopilot and that’s why doing the six repairs above in a consistent way so that you are focusing on helping your dog learn good habits is a great use of your time.
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Breland, K. and Breland, M., 1961. The misbehavior of organisms. American psychologist, 16(11), p.681. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040090
Miller, H.C., DeWall, C.N., Pattison, K., Molet, M. and Zentall, T.R., 2012. Too dog tired to avoid danger: Self-control depletion in canines increases behavioral approach toward an aggressive threat. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 19(3), pp.535-540. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-012-0231-0
Morrill, K., Hekman, J., Li, X., McClure, J., Logan, B., Goodman, L., Gao, M., Dong, Y., Alonso, M., Carmichael, E. and Snyder-Mackler, N., 2022. Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes. Science, 376(6592), p.eabk0639. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk0639
Sapolsky, R. M., 2017. Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst. Penguin Press, New York.
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Hi, I’m Tracey - founder of Best Dog Learning and Stuff and a huge prey drive enthusiast.
I’ve lived with high prey drive dogs for over 20 years, and I know first-hand how challenging and rewarding they can be.
I back up that hands-on experience with academic study: a BSc (Hons) in Canine Behaviour and Training and a Master’s degree with distinction in Applied Animal Behaviour and Training. I also hold an MA (Hons) in Philosophy, which shapes the ethical approach behind all my work.
Alongside working with thousands of owners of high prey drive dogs, I’ve contributed to the science too:
