Your walk is going beautifully. Your Collie is walking on a loose lead, checking in, you’re really enjoying your walk.
But then…
A squirrel breaks cover, or a dog appears at the far end of the field, or a scent catches on the wind.
And just like that, you don’t exist any more.
You call.
Nothing.
You get the treats out – the good ones, the ones you save for exactly this.
Nothing.
You try the squeaky toy, the excited voice, the thing that usually works.
Nothing.
And somewhere in that moment, a thought creeps in that most Collie owners have had at least once:
I must not be interesting enough.
Realistically – how are you ever going to be more exciting than a squirrel shooting up a tree?
Or a football match starting up at the far end of the park?
You’re not about to pull out a ball of your own and start a match to compete with it.
Put like that, it sounds obvious. But it’s exactly the trap most of us fall into without noticing. If the dog chose the squirrel over you, the logical next move feels like it has to be: be more exciting than the squirrel.
Better treats. A better toy. A more thrilling voice. Whatever it takes to tip the scales back in your favour.
It’s not a daft theory. But it’s also a competition you’ll never win, because you’re not up against one squirrel.
You’re up against every squirrel, every dog, every bird lifting off a hedge, every scent laid down by something that passed through hours before you got there.
You’re up against a nervous system that was bred, for generations, to notice movement instantly and lock onto it completely – because that noticing was the whole point of the job.
Here’s the thing: training was never supposed to be about out-competing the world.
It’s about teaching your Collie that the behaviour itself is worth doing – that checking in, walking on a loose lead, coming back when called, are things worth doing in their own right, not because you managed to out-dazzle a squirrel in the moment.
The moment you stop trying to out-compete life’s distractions is the moment you open the door to reliability that actually stands up to real life – the kind that works in your living room, in the middle of a field, or anywhere else you find yourselves.
It’s worth making the point: a Border Collie clocking wildlife, another dog, sudden movement, or an interesting scent is not a sign anything has gone wrong.
It’s not a training gap. It’s not a bond problem. It’s a working brain doing exactly what it was built to do.
If your dog never noticed anything, that would be the odd thing.
So much of the guilt owners hold comes from measuring themselves up against other dog breeds who simply aren’t as interested in the world – dogs who can take or leave a squirrel, who don’t register a dog at 200 metres, a runner headed past, a cyclist appearing suddenly etc. etc.
But that was never what you were working with, and it was never a fair comparison to begin with.
A Collie who notices everything is not a Collie who’s broken. That’s part of their DNA.
There’s a distinction worth making here, and it isn’t about dominance or being “pack leader,” because that framing doesn’t hold up and it doesn’t help.
It’s about relevance.
Does your voice matter to your dog in the moment – not whether they’re obedient or perfect, but whether they’re actually looking to you for information, or making every decision entirely on their own.
And relevance isn’t built in the big, dramatic moments.
It’s built in the small, everyday ones – whether your dog checks in without being asked, whether they wait rather than push past you through a door, whether “no” in the kitchen actually means something.
If your voice doesn’t matter in those small moments, it isn’t suddenly going to matter the second a squirrel runs past. But if it does matter in the small moments, it’s more likely to carry weight in the big ones too.
Think of it as an elastic band between you and your dog. When they’re young, that band is short – they’re aware of where you are, and they check in constantly, almost without meaning to.
As they get older, the world pulls harder on their attention, and unless you’ve built enough value into that connection, the band stretches further and further before they forget it’s there at all.
The real question isn’t whether your dog gets distracted. It’s how far the band stretches before they look to ping back to you.
There’s a real difference between a dog who’s noticed something and a dog who’s gone in over their head.
Trainers sometimes call this critical distance – the point where a dog flips from “I can cope, I can still hear you” to “I can’t, my brain is full.”
Just below that point is a sort of sweet spot: enough of a challenge to be meaningful, not so much that they tip over it. Push a dog past that threshold and no learning is happening at all in that moment, whatever you try.
That’s the actual distinction worth watching for – not “did my dog notice the squirrel,” but “is my dog still with me while they’re noticing it.”
A dog who’s interested can glance at the squirrel and still take a treat, still hear their name, still turn away if you ask.
A dog who’s gone over threshold isn’t ignoring you out of stubbornness – their nervous system genuinely doesn’t have room for “listen to the human” on their list of priorities right now.
Arousal isn’t a switch that’s either off or on.
Think of it more like a dimmer – something you can learn to read and work with, rather than something that simply shoots up to full volume when you’re on a walk.
Food tends to bring that dial down, which is part of why it’s so useful for calm behaviours.
Toys and play tend to bring it up, which is brilliant when you’re deliberately building focus under a bit of pressure – as long as you’re the one still steering it.
And if your dog won’t take food from you at all in a given moment, that’s not them being fussy. That’s feedback that their arousal is too high right then for learning to happen – not a failure on your part or theirs.
Once it stops being a competition against the environment, the whole thing looks different.
You’re not trying to be the most exciting thing in every field for the rest of your dog’s life. You’re building your dog’s capacity to notice something and still be reachable – to hold both at once, rather than one replacing the other.
It helps to think about this on two levels.
Individual behaviours – recall, a loose lead, checking in past a distraction – work like their own small bank accounts. Every time your dog chooses you with a squirrel in view, that’s a deposit.
Every time you ask for something they’re not ready for and it falls apart, that’s a withdrawal.
A dog who can choose you with a squirrel in view, a cyclist going past, another dog nearby, isn’t a dog who got lucky once – it’s a dog with a stack of deposits behind them.
But underneath all of those separate accounts sits something bigger: the relationship itself.
Brené Brown talks about trust as a marble jar – not built in one dramatic gesture, but marble by marble, in small moments most people wouldn’t think to notice.
It works the same way between you and your dog.
Every fair ask, every bit of patience when they’re struggling, every time you read them right and don’t push past what they can cope with, is a marble in the jar.
It’s not the recall account or the loose-lead account on its own that lets your dog choose you over the world. It’s the jar underneath all of them – the accumulated evidence they have that you’re worth checking in with, built up in moments too small to remark on individually, but impossible to fake or rush.
If your Collie is brilliant right up until something more interesting appears – and then you may as well not be there – that’s exactly the sort of problem I love to help people solve.
It’s not a flaw in your dog. It’s not a flaw in you. It’s about how a Collie’s brain works and working with it rather than against it.
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