My boy has since passed on, but he would never consider leaving us. So we just let him off the leash on the trails. Whenever we heard people ahead of us we'd call him back and put him back on the leash until they were out of earshot again. It never caused any problems in the 12 years he was with us. Such a precious, beautiful boy.
Same with mine. When he was new to us, he ran away twice so I put him on a leash strictly and put a GPS tracker on him. Thought he just wasn't one of those off the leash dogs. A year later a friend of mine told me "just cut him loose". I told him he runs, he looked at the dog and said "nah. He isn't going to. Try it."
Was hectars and hectars of his private forest, so I thought "what the hell, we'll find him with the tracker when he's hungry" and massive surprise: He really never ran off. Not that day and never since. 20m ahead, 20m back, never have to worry, as soon as people can be heard or he loses sight of me he's by my side immediately.
I wish he was good enough for that but he believes he's a hunting dog and if he smells deer scent he's gone... He event managed to dig out a portridge once! He picked up the scent, stopped listening to us and 30 seconds later bam, bird came out of hiding 10m from us and our dog came back as if nothing happened.
