The recall command most owners accidentally poison in month one

Roughly half the dogs I'm hired to help with recall have already been trained, by their owners, to associate "come" with something unpleasant — usually the end of a walk, a bath, or getting yelled at for something unrelated that happened five minutes earlier.

Dogs don't generalize the way we assume. If "come" reliably precedes something the dog dislikes even 20% of the time, the word itself picks up that association, regardless of how many times it also precedes a treat. This is why a dog that comes perfectly in the yard ignores the same word entirely at the dog park, where "come" has usually meant "the fun is over" every single time it's been used.

The fix isn't more repetition of a poisoned word. It's abandoning that word entirely and building a brand new one from zero, used only for genuinely good outcomes for the first several weeks — treats, play, affection, never the end of anything fun.

Most owners are stunned by how fast the new word works compared to how long they'd been failing with the old one. The dog was never stubborn. The word was just already ruined.

Part of the deeper dive: The Practical Pet Owner's Guide: Training, Behavior, and What's Actually Normal.