@YorkshireFelix Oh god poor you with the weather, that’s grim. And there was me whinging last night on a lead walk in the very low-level slippiness here.
Re making yourself more exciting than anything – I think it works up to a point. It is fairly unlikely that any of us will be more exciting to our dogs (especially gundogs, maybe Brie is exempt, @CoubousAndTourmalet) than, say, a pheasant, but the way I look at it, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If you know what will tempt them then you can work with it rather than against it. If hedge diving is what they want (and need) to do to be fulfilled, then go into/next to the hedge with them – control their movement with hand signals, stop them and sit them up, ask them to go back or left or right or whatever, but so that the reward and the game is still hedge diving and working with scent. Chuck some balls into the hedge etc for them to find. Then they get their hedge-diving box ticked and you get control, and they understand that spanielling is on your terms.
Today I took a rabbit ball out with me and chucked it behind me while she was ahead or side to side a few times, stopped her, turned her and asked her to find it. She was delighted! We did about five reps of that and then I put it away and praised her and off she went again to be (slightly) feral, but on my terms, listening to my directions and stopping when I stopped. We did loads of autosit today which I find builds engagement really well and gives them an easy win. I always like her to finish the walk feeling like she's the winner.
Full disclosure – save anything think pupsy is soon to be a FTCH (lol) – before we got to the rabbit ball part of the walk this morning she decided that she was going to go off a bit further than I was comfortable with in the field we were in. She ignored the whistle and my voice so instead of getting cross I walked away quite a distance (keeping her in sight) and properly hid behind a hay bale. She genuinely lost me when she came up for air after running around with her nose down and after she found me she was much, much more engaged, so I think sometimes injecting into them a tiny bit of fear of losing you is no bad thing.