Dog Send Away Training: Control at a Distance

Train the destination before the distance - a mat, a cone or a platform the dog runs to and stays on - because a send away is a target behaviour with a long approach, and the reason most send aways fall apart at twenty feet is that the dog is reading your arm instead of looking for a place to be.

What a send away is for

Getting the dog somewhere useful without going there yourself. To a mat when the door opens, to a crate when the pan comes out of the oven, out of a gateway, away from a hazard, or into a start position for a sport exercise.

It is the mirror image of a recall, and it fills the gap recall leaves. Recall brings the dog to you, which is the wrong answer whenever you are the dangerous side of the situation — across a road, on the far side of a car park, at the top of a flight of stairs.

Most owners never train it and then discover they wanted it once. It costs about ten minutes a day for a fortnight to have a usable version.

Why your arm stops working at distance

Dogs read human pointing well, and they read a specific thing. Soproni and colleagues varied the gesture across three experiments and found dogs performed above chance when they could see the hand and index finger protruding from the human body contour, and fell back on body position when they could not.

Lakatos and colleagues pushed it further, comparing dogs with two- and three-year-old children on unusual gestures. Dogs failed at elbow cross-pointing and at forward cross-pointing, while succeeding with leg pointing — the authors describe dogs as biased toward using protruding body parts as directional signals.

The practical translation is exact. A send-away signal must be a full arm extended clearly away from your outline, held still, with your body squared toward the target. A small flick of the wrist, a hand held in front of your chest, or a cross-body point is a gesture the literature says dogs are worst at reading, and distance makes all of them smaller.

Building the send away

Five stages. The destination is trained first, at zero distance, and distance is the last thing you add.

Train the destination until it is worth going to

A mat, a platform or an upturned box, with the dog paid for getting on it and staying. This is mat training and it is the entire foundation. A dog that has no reason to arrive will not run twenty yards to nothing.

Send from one step away, with food already there

Stand next to the target, place food on it in view, step back one pace, release the dog. You are not teaching the dog to leave you; you are teaching it that the target pays and that leaving you is how it gets paid.

Add distance in single paces, backwards

One pace, two, four, eight. Any failure means the last increase was too big, so halve it and rebuild. This is the only part of the process where people rush, and rushing here is what produces the dog that runs out ten feet and spins back.

Attach the signal and the word together

Arm out, full extension, then the word, then release. Say it once. AVSAB names capturing, shaping and luring as the toolkit here, and the send away is pure shaping of an approach.

Fade the visible food, then shrink the target

Food goes into your pocket and is delivered at the target after the dog arrives, not before it leaves. Then the mat becomes a tile, a spot, a doorway, a gap in a hedge — until the dog will go where you send it rather than only where a mat is.

The target is the whole trick

A send away is a destination behaviour wearing a distance costume. Everything hard about it is the dog's certainty that the far end is worth reaching, and everything that breaks it is a far end that stopped paying.

The MSD manual's general principle covers the mechanism: arrange the environment so the response you want is the available one, and reinforce it. A visible mat with a history of food is exactly that arrangement, imposed on a field.

So when the send away deteriorates, the fix is almost never more distance work. It is going back to the target, paying it heavily for a few sessions, and rebuilding out.

When sending is safer than calling

Your dog is on the far side of a road, or a car park, or a stream, and it is looking at you. A recall brings it across the hazard at speed.

A send away — to a gate, a tree, a mat you carry, or simply a hand signal it has been paid for following away from you — buys you the time to walk round. It is also the cue that gets a dog out of a doorway a stranger is coming through, or out from under the feet of someone carrying something heavy.

That is the honest reason to train this on a pet dog rather than a sport dog. The cost of not having it, on the day you need it, is on our broken leg surgery page: $1,371 to $5,803, with $2,615 typical.

Why this is the exercise sold with an electronic collar

Because distance is where a handler feels least in control, and a remote collar is marketed as control at distance. It is the standard pitch and the evidence does not support it.

AVSAB's review reports that even with experienced trainers, no difference in effectiveness was found between remote electronic shock collars and reward-based training for recall and stopping chasing, and that reward-trained dogs responded after a shorter delay. Its trainer-selection guide lists prong and shock collars as red flags outright.

There is also a specific failure mode here. A send away is the dog moving away from you; punishing it at distance teaches the dog that going away is dangerous, which is the opposite of the behaviour on this page.

How far should my dog be able to go?

Far enough for the job you have. For a household, ten to fifteen yards covers the door, the kitchen and the garden gate; for sport, thirty or more.

Do not chase a number. A reliable ten-yard send is worth more than an unreliable forty-yard one, and the way to a longer send is a shorter one that never fails.

My dog runs out and comes straight back. Why?

Because arriving has not been paid recently enough, or because the reward keeps happening next to you. Both teach the dog that the fast route to food is a loop.

Fix it by paying at the destination — walk out and deliver food on the mat rather than calling the dog in. And drop the distance by half for a week; a dog spinning back at fifteen yards is a dog that was solid at seven.

Can I use this at a dog park or on a walk?

Yes, and it is one of the few distance behaviours that survives a busy environment, because the dog is running toward something rather than away from a distraction. Practise it on a long line first, in the same order as above.

It works best alongside the entry and exit routine in dog park training — a dog that can be sent to a spot is a dog you can park while you deal with whatever just happened.

What this behaviour costs when it goes wrong

This is not only a quality-of-life question. Where it ends in a veterinary bill, we publish the price of that bill from our own dataset rather than leaving the stakes abstract. These are the outcomes it leads to, and what they cost.

Calling a dog back across a road instead of sending it away from one

A fracture from a vehicle impact, repaired with pins, plate or fixator. We price it at dog broken leg surgery, $1,371 to $5,803 — $2,615 typical.

Related guides

• dog mat training — Dog mat training works when duration is paid for and the mat means the same thing everywhere.
• dog park training — Dog park training starts at the gate, because that is where the trouble is.
• dog trick training — Tricks are where you build marker timing, rate of reinforcement and shaping.

Every guide we have written is on the dog training guide index.

Sources

1. Dogs' (Canis familiaris) responsiveness to human pointing gestures — Journal of Comparative Psychology 116:27-34 (Soproni, Miklósi, Topál & Csányi), 2002.
2. A comparative approach to dogs' (Canis familiaris) and human infants' comprehension of various forms of pointing gestures — Animal Cognition 12:621-631 (Lakatos, Soproni, Dóka & Miklósi), 2009.
3. Behavioral Problems of Dogs — MSD Veterinary Manual (Merck), professional edition, 2026.
4. Position Statement on Humane Dog Training — American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB), 2021.
5. How to Choose a Trainer — American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB), 2026.