Hi has anyone any training ideas my 11 month old puppy has started retrieving quite well but with retrieves he cant see and he's hunting for them how do you train him to move forward left or right? Any advice welcome
Directional handling should be taught independently to start with. You begin by having the dog sitting facing you and put a retrieve or a food bowl out to one side, not particularly far. Then you use your cue both physical and verbal to direct the dog to go in that direction. You do that with all three directions, left, right and back(away from you). Recall will bring the dog back towards you. Once you've done each cue separately you can put dummies further away and you can also put out more than one dummy at a time culminating in the three card trick with dummies left, right and behind the dog. In conjunction with the directional training you need two other components - a hunt cue and a stop. The stop is the foundation for getting the dog to reconnect with you and give it some help with where the retrieve is and the hunt tells the dog it's in the right area and it should get it's nose down and start looking(sniffing) Hope that helps!
That's great thanks I have the stop command and am working with that what, I'm not sure what verbal or whistle command to train him to hunt I use 'find it' at the moment
"find it" is just fine traditionally you might use "hi lost" (preferably said in the most bizarre way possible - hi looooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrst) and a common whistle cue to hunt is pip peeeeeeeep, pip peeeeeeeep as long as it's discernable from any of your other whistle cues though you can, as always, use what you like.
I stick to the whistle. Even with no neighbours to speak of, I'd still feel like a doofus shouting "hi looooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrst" I like to think of my hunt whistle cue being like an owl hooting. It's quite softly blown, and a twit-twoooooo kind of pattern.
I have an owl as my hunt whistle. The last training day I went on, we discussed hunt whistles, and one lady had a very upbeat whistle 'it's there' so a higher peep - hard to explain in words. Whereas my owl trails off, hers sort of goes pee-phe-oo. Well, you have to hear it really. But much more cheery than an owl!
