@LemonpaIms She had a super long walk this afternoon with her best friend, flushing pheasants, so she is very pleased with life and now curled up on me on the sofa.
I can bore you to tears with gundog training ideas if you like! There are loads that work well for ‘pet’ life. I don’t know if you’ve done any sit stays at distance with him but that's a really good one to start off with – it works their brains and is good for steadying them up. In short (and forgive me if I’m teaching my granny to suck eggs etc) –
- sit him up somewhere, in the house/garden – would do it in a low-distraction area to start with
- take a few steps back, make sure he’s still sitting
- walk back in, mark, treat
And then repeat, and you can go further and further away, round corners, different directions, doing a dance, waving your hands in the air eventually, all the while building it up. The idea is that he’s sitting exactly where he is until you say otherwise. Just don’t rush it – you want to go just a few steps further away each time. I started off walking backwards away from her so she could see my face and I’d hold my hand up as a signal to stay put, but now I can walk off away from her. We do it in all sorts of places and it’s a good one to practice on walks with dropping a poo bag off at a bin, for example.
When you're doing it, if he creeps forward towards, which he might well, that’s fine – just walk back to him, and take him back to where he was and say ‘sit’ again. And then do the same again but leave him sitting for a shorter distance so he nails every 'level'. You want to build this up pretty slowly so it’s solid – don't worry if he's shifty and wobbly to start with as he will learn. I don’t use any command for this as to me, ‘sit’ means ‘sit until I say otherwise’. I don’t recommend recalling him from that point – you need to be returning to him. Him sitting away from you in a field and then recalling to you is a separate exercise, a skill for another day, and one that you want to master second, in my view.
Would also suggest the gundog ‘back’ – I say ‘go back’ but it’s the same thing. In the field it has a specific purpose but at home it’s handy for picking up toys that they’ve left behind somewhere. I use it for that all the time.
There will be YouTube videos of this I’m sure but the way I taught it was –
- put a bowl with a few treats/kibble allowance in it a few metres away – can start doing it inside but a low-distraction garden probably works best
- on lead walk him up to it and make sure he has a good look at what’s in the bowl
- walk him back to where you want to start from, sit him next to you, and crouch down a bit pointing with your hand towards the bowl, and say ‘go back’. Can either let him go to it with the lead dragging or you can unclip
- he goes to the bowl, takes a treat, and then you recall him back for praise
He should get that pretty quick. You want to be pointing directly at the bowl, be clear with your instruction and your hand direction – that opens you up to another good training bit which I could write another essay on! You will likely need to keep replenishing the bowl but you can practice his sit stay while you're doing that so it's a two in one.
And then practice, practice, practice. You might have to do it a few times with the bowl – the bowl is useful as then he can see where he’s supposed to be going ‘back’ to. Eventually you can send him back for toys he’s left. In the mornings pupsy always takes a toy out for a wee with her, and she invariably leaves it behind. She knows now that if she gets to the back door without it, I will say ‘go back’ and she literally goes back to fetch whatever she left. So it does have transferability!
If you got this far, bravo! But I hope that gives you some inspiration? I have loads of these kinds of drills and we do them both on walks and at home for fun. Right now we’re teaching a stop when flushing a bird and the foundation of that comes from the sit stay, basically, so there is a pathway you can follow and you needn’t even go anywhere near a gun/any game if you don’t want.