I really hope that someone can help me with this problem as I am getting so frustrated with myself nd my 8 month old pup.
We have a ball on a rope which is kept in the car for walks. Mabel goes wild for this ball and it obviously means alot to her. But... she will not return to me once I throw the ball. Any other time she comes back straight away, but once the ball is in her mouth she runs around shaking it and playing and absolutley refusing to come back.
I have tried
... getting her to run around with our other dog first and waiting  for 15 minutes or so before throwing the the ball in the hope that her excitement will have waned.
..... I always have a bag of dog chocs with me, which I show her before playing, but her desire to keep the ball is greater than any food reward .
...... When she is running around I also completely ignore her and just play with the other dog, in the hope that her curiosity will get her to return. 
....I never go after her or walk to her and I will not call her except when I am ready to go home. 

So I decided today to see how long this stand off would last and after nearly an hour on the field, she still made no attempt to come back. Please what do I do?  I suspect that I need to go right back to the beginning , but where is the beginning and how do I start all over again. Any helpful ideas on a retraining plan would be so welcome, as I feel we are both missing out on a fun part of play

I don't know if i will be of much use to you! but what I would do in your situation is either forget about the ball when out walking and just let her enjoy her time without having the ball there. Or put her on a long lin if you need to throw the ball and then you can retrieve her once she has the ball and is completely ignoring you.. have you also tried running away from her? i know this will work every time with my boy if he thinks he is going to get left behind and he has found an extremely interesting smell :rolleyes:
I'm sure there will be other ideas

Try putting the ball on a long line so you have control of it or try having 2 balls. Obviously not on lines as it could get a bit interesting

As it is a ball on a rope, does she enjoy playing tuggy with you?  If so, have two balls and as she returns offer the second one, if she drops the first to get the second have a good game of tuggy before throwing it.

Otherwise, I would forget the ball out on a walk and work on her retreive at home, get that right first.

I'm a bit concerned about your saying:

>I will not call her except when I am ready to go home

Surely you mean it the other way around? If you only call her when it's hometime she'll be reluctant for fun-time to stop. Or have I misunderstood what you said?

Other than that I'd say forget the ball when you're exercising till you've got her retrieve sorted at home.

I always use two tennis balls because I had the same problem.......he'd keep the ball for ages before dropping it for me to throw. It was so easy to do, took about 5 minutes before he realised that he'd get the second ball thrown only when he'd dropped the first one by (or usually nearby !) my feet. He only has the tennis balls on certain walks otherwise I think they can become a bit obsessed. He knows the two fields we use where he gets them and if I try to walk him through them without tennis balls he won't do a thing - just walks at my side staring at my pockets !. I gave up trying to get both balls from him at the end so now one goes away and he's allowed to carry the other one home which he drops by the front door.

two balls did it for me(as suggested on here) also i use one of those chuckers(cant throw....feeble woman) and when i lift it up to throw the next ball he drops the first.the other day i lost a ball and having just the one I realised that he had learnt to drop the ball now, HA! training without even trying

At 8 months, she's reached the "Kevin" stage where rebellions of this type can be classic and an increasingly confident young dog decides that play stops at its convenience rather than yours! If you simply wait for her to decide when she'll return, I'm afraid you just make the recall problem worse because no sensible dog will stop having fun when it knows its owner will just hang around waiting. So for now I'd either ditch the ball altogether or take some particularly tasty treats out with you which you know will have a greater value than the ball.

I'd try teaching her a play retrieve, using motivational methods.  I think if you search there are posts on it on CDs and hopefully you will find some help. You can overcome even "Kevin" behaviour if you train through it and give dogs a good enough reason to do what you want... ;)

Lindsay
x

Thank you very much for all your replies. We went on our usual field today and I left the ball behind.  She was absolutely fine, hardly left my side and when she did run off she came immediately when called. It was the first walk that I have enjoyed with her in ages.
So I have decided to give her the ball to play with only in our back garden for a few weeks and hopefully break the connection between walk and ball. Then I will try the two ball approach, but I think I 'll buy two new identical balls so there is way she can have a favourite. As for calling , well I stopped calling her when it became clear that she wasn't going to come, in case she started to think it was okay to ignore me when I called.
Dogs eh, worse than teenage boys any day !

my dog doesnt seem to return when shes got something in her mouth, but she doesnt do any other tricks when she has something in her mouth, so i started by teaching her to hold a toy in her mouth and doing sits, downs etc and then linked it to the recall. this seemed to work quite well, but have to carry on, other she forgets that she can do both at the same time, or pretends that she cant!, more likely the sencond!!
does your dog do other tricks with something in her mouth, just a suggestion

I agree with jeangenie....if you only call your dog at end of playtime, your dog is less likely to come. Make a point of recalling your dog on multiple occasions during play, reward the dog, then let the dog go off and play again. I also would agree with using toy swapping, with two toys of equal value to your dog...after all, if you had a jam donut in your hand and someone asked you to swap it for a bit of dry toast, what would you do? :) your dog is obviously bright.

Lucy is the same age and suffering from all the same Kevin tendencies.  Surprisingly, however, having spent months suffering similar problems with her inability, or lack of interest in retrieving a ball, she has suddenly got it perfectly.  She now comes straight back and puts it in my hand each time!  We spent ages thinking she just wasn't interested in retrieving so we trained her in the house with lots of treats at very short distances and she eventually got the message.  We also realised that she was never going to try to do it while our older dog was around at first so we trained her on her own and now we always make sure we have a ball each for the two dogs - trying to use one ball with two dogs is a recipe for disaster!

Good luck with the Kevin period!

My retrieving Bedlington would bring me anything (everything) from the floor or out of the wash basket, but if I threw anything (like a ball) for her she'd run after it and play with it but not bring it back :rolleyes:

What I did was to teach it to her in backwards stages :D  First to 'take' and 'give' me a ball while sitting, then to go and get a ball off the floor and bring it to me.  Once she had that then the retrieve in the house was easy :D   After a week of house retrieve we started all over again outside the house.  Once that was good then I tried it (but only once) on a walk, she was great first time :D  but I only let her retrieve once.  Building it up gradually, always stopping while she still wanted more keeps her interested and means that she doesn't get the chance to run off and do her own thing  :D :D
It's a pain when they turn into 'Kevin' but they do get better :)
Hope this helps