Dakota:
Monday evening, I began Dakota with wing-on-a-string training and most of my time was spent keeping her to “stay” long enough to toss the wing. After about a 10-minute session, I put her in the house while I trained with Sophie.
After Sophie’s training session, I brought Dakota back out and we worked with one of the new bumpers. I had tied a pair of wings to each bumper. She did very well retrieving to hand, but again most of my time was spent trying to get her to “stay” while I tossed the bumper.
I’ll have to remember to burn off her excess energy before training.
Sophie:
I worked long retrieves with Sophie and found that she has a problem with them. Until four months ago, we lived in town and all my work with Sophie had been either backyard training or on the short grass of soccer fields. She could always see the bumper even on long retrieves. I have not even had a bird sail on me during hunting season so her so her retrieves have all been relatively short.
Now she has a tendency to hunt short and it is a challenge to cast her out on long retrieves where she cannot see the bumper in the tall grass and weeds. Another problem that is developing is my fault. Because I have thrown the bumpers in patches of tall grass on the edges of the pasture, Sophie now has a difficult time retrieving bumpers thrown down the center. She keeps fading to the edges where she expects the bumpers to be rather than following my direction in casting. I’ll need to do a better job in mixing things up for her.
Tags: bird dog training, casting drills, double retrieve, hunting dog training, retriever training problems
