OKKKK I have been through all the old threads, God help me, and have collated here, for @VanGoSunflowers and anyone else lurking or present a load of previously posted gundog training stuff, a combination of various bits and pieces, reconstituted into something that might be faintly useful from my amateur experiences with pupsy. (All I can say to @YorkshireFelix is: “ball curtains”, for that is the phrase I was trying to remember the other day about nasty boy dogs. And for @CoubousAndTourmalet and much missed Brodie, how about a pyrecock?)
Hopefully this helps someone somewhere.
(Apologies for the length and hopefully this fits on the first page so that it can always be here for people to find easily.)
Leave it
A fun one to train as you can sit on the floor with snacks to do it: pile in each hand, offer one, ask to leave, when he leaves give the other. And it can be built up and up. The other day she brought a very ripe dead pigeon (not killed by her) to my feet and the sequence went: 'dead', 'leave', 'walk on' and it was so rewarding to watch her put into practice everything she has actually been taught.
Sit stays and ‘wait’
These really tire them out sitting there having a think! Little and often for that. Sit him up, walk back two paces, walk back in, mark, reward. Repeat until he’s rock solid at two paces, and then gradually increase distance/direction/level of distraction and you can do it everywhere! 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. And then keep repeating 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.
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, and one that you want to master second, in my view.
I honestly think getting a solid stay at distance has been the most rewarding dog thing I’ve done because you can utilise it all the time. I get her to sit up while I take the poo bag to the bin, or go back in the house and get a dummy or whatever – and she’s still sitting there! The key thing I found with that was not to make it too hard too quickly: sometimes I’ll do one now and realise it’s too far for her or she’s not concentrating properly as she breaks the stay and I have to take her back to where she was and start again, so it’s still very much a learning experience.
I think I taught ‘wait’ at the same time which is also really useful as it’s somewhere between recall and a stay. One of the parks near us has lots of paths and windy corners so I shouted ‘wait’ and pipped the whistle every time she got to a corner so she didn’t go round it before me and she quickly got the idea. Can also do inside with doorways to stop barging.
Offlead lead
One thing my gundog trainer suggested to me ages ago which I try and do but am not always successful in is when I let her off to start with, I try and get in a few paces of offlead heel first, so that her reaction to being let off isn't just to bog off. I don't go/let her off anywhere where it would be dangerous if she did so but it's a nice idea to try and get them to engage more – just as you're doing with heeling before releasing after recall.
‘Back’
I say ‘go back’ but it’s the same thing. In the shooting 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/familiar 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. 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!
In general…
If it’s not unseemly, but I remembered it because @Bupster kindly pointed it out on another thread the other day, I echo my own advice either on here or on the puppy thread before – sometimes there are times when it’s not worth training a skill because it’s the wrong environment, and when frankly they don’t deserve to be trained. For pupsy, on the way out of the house is that time. First thing, she always needs a poo, she wants to sniff the morning mice/rabbits, and she wants to get to wherever we’re going. She isn’t going to walk to heel, and she probably is going to pull me a bit. But on the way home, she’s easier so that’s when we work on it, and then I work on it hard and I massively praise any offering of the behaviour I’m looking for as she is amenable to taking praise.
‘This way’/teaching a zig zag quartering pattern
I also did (and still do) work on two pips by running round a field/the garden shouting ‘this way!’, pipping, and then changing direction back and forth like a mad woman, doing a totally bonkers pattern but just making sure she’s always turning on my command. Sometimes when we’re out and about I test her formally on it and decide that she’s going to do, say, five paces and then turn. Walking kind of behind her I can get her to run for five, turn, run for five, turn in a diagonal zigzag up a field – and that is really fun because you’re working directly with them and asking them to do the thing they’re bred to do so everyone wins. You look mad doing it but I don’t care.
Not chasing things
Disclaimer: all of our Not Chasing Things work is ongoing and pupsy is better on some animals than others! Pigeons in our garden still risk their lives daily, crows get almost universally blanked, and we continue to work on rabbits and game birds. I guess I have approached it in lots of small ways all at once but without any kind of theory – just doing it totally uneducatedly as I go along. But if I think about it I guess this is what I’ve done.
You have to link a more positive action with what they want to do. So they see the bird/furry creatures and they want to run but you capture that moment and get their attention for something better. A good ‘leave’ works here too, so when I was working on crows in particular I would see the crows, see her see the crows and shout ‘leave’ so she got to know that seeing crows meant ‘leave’. And she knew that performing ‘leave’ meant she’d be rewarded in some way. I think that is fundamentally all any kind of training is but doing a good ‘leave’ on a crow is the sort of thing that gives you an immediate result as they have simply not chased it, if you see what I mean. Onlead this works well too – they see a duck, say, by the river and you can stick in a ‘leave’ and combine that with physically moving away from the duck – or better still pre-empting it as it's not a surprise.
Equally, I accepted that progress wouldn't be linear. If she took a few paces towards a crow but turned away, she’d be rewarded for the positive action, or even if she did chase it but recalled off it, I would reward the recall, and then I built it up in stages. A long-line helps a lot here because you can control the action and we did make judicious use of it when she was little.
Secondly – exposure. We did a lot of sitting watching deer quietly when she was little – and I mean loads, and from about 14 weeks. We live at the back of a deer park so I have an uninterrupted, unlimited, and almost private supply of moving creatures for her, and we used to go and sit as close to them as I’d dare with her on a long-line and just do nothing. We used to sit and wait and I’d hope that they’d take off so that I could show her that the response she needs when deer run is to do nothing. If she moved to run I’d say ‘sit sit sit’ and then when she had and she was calm again she’d get a reward and we’d move off, walk for a bit, and then do the same again at the next group of deer.
I think a lot of it comes down to familiarity – how I see it, you can’t teach them not to chase something that they’ve never encountered, or to not do something that they’ve never been told not to do, if that makes sense. I don’t know if that’s the right approach – a lot of people with working dogs keep their pups naive about game for a long time and I understand that, but where we live pupsy couldn’t stay naive for long if I ever wanted to take her on a good walk as there’s so much of it around. I had to show her what to do with it instead. That’s what I mean when I talk about going to gamey places with her – I put her into environments where there are ‘hazards’, albeit in safe, fenced fields not near a road, so that she can learn what to do when she encounters them. It means that yes, they probably will chase a deer/rabbit once or twice, but then they learn not to when you show them what to do instead and reward them for it.
Retrieve trouble
My question to someone was: Is it the retrieve and drop as a combination that you’ve struggled with, or both individually?
My top tip for the former is to find a quiet bit of distraction-free corridor/passage/alleyway where you won’t be disturbed, and sit/crouch on the floor with a ball or other desirable object – balled-up socks are really good as they smell like us. Then have him next to you and send him to do tiny, tiny retrieves – like, a metre – encouraging him back into your arms and praising when he comes in. The corridor bit is key because it needs to be somewhere where he can’t run around you – you need to be the dead-end so he is forced to bring it back to you.
Don’t worry about delivery and how he gives it to you – if he spits it out or puts it in your hand – just make sure he does. Don’t snatch it off him (key), but let him hold it and then you can ask him to ‘drop’. I say ‘dead’ but it doesn’t matter what you say. Make it super fun, like you’re teaching a 10-week-old pup, and only do a few reps at a time or else he’ll get bored and there’s nothing worse than a dog that is bored with the exercise to ruin all the headway you’ve made on something. When he's got it with a short retrieve, just keep building it up, and you can build on it in different, harder areas.
If he won't pick it up and bring it back and you can't work out why, as you've got a longline and harness anyway, pop them on with the longline clipped on the front and then if he goes to bugger off somewhere else you can give a gentle tug and turn him back to you with big praise when he does it.
To work on the individual drop too just go back to puppy basics – sit on the floor and put something down for him to pick up, ball of socks again maybe. Let him pick it up and praise, then let him hold it and don’t grab it back, and then let him hold and ask for it back gently. Just build up the process tiny bit by bit. I think sometimes we accidentally make things too hard for them and then they space out and can’t do any of it, so then you have to break down into tiny bits what you’re asking them to do and make sure they can do each one really well before they move on. Some of those steps are minuscule, like just looking at something calmly, but they all fit together.
Not chasing things part 2
We are working really hard on not chasing moving objects again and my trainer gave me an exercise with a dummy where I just hold it over pupsy’s head. She is marked and rewarded every time she is calm when it’s there, and then when I move it up, down, side to side etc and she remains sitting and calm. We’re building the steadiness on the ground as it were, just looking at the thing, before we rebuild her being steady when it’s actually moving – if that makes sense? And the same applies to the drop and retrieve. It’s really easy to kill the retrieve drive by not making it fun, as I’ve found to my peril as she hunts up and picks things really well but then gives up retrieving them halfway back to me.
And this was a kind of intro to gundog work I wrote out for someone with a baby cocker bitch
These bits below form a combination of some of what I did with my cocker when we brought her home and some of the stuff my gundog trainer got me doing before we met, and then in the first lesson. It’s all pretty basic and there’s no reason you can’t start on it straight away.
– Heel, both offlead and on. Obviously you want to work on her lead walking but one of the most useful skills you can teach her is to walk to heel when she’s off too. Exactly the same as onlead but she’s choosing to be next to you, ideally engaging in some eye contact, but not pulling ahead. Ideally for this she wants to be actually at your heel and you can reward with treats or a clicker if you’re using one.
– Coupled with offlead heel is the autosit. So helpful! And also looks cool. So when you stop she stops – that’s it really. You can train with the lead on to start with and graduate to off lead – or even with a trailing lead attached so you can easily stop her. But she should want to be with you so this should be pretty easy to teach. Again can reward with treats when she’s in the right position.
– A proper ‘sit’. I’m sure you’ve taught ‘sit’ to mean sit down, but a lot of gundog trainers (and I def subscribe to this) want ‘sit’ to mean ‘sit until I say otherwise’. If you can crack that you don’t need a ‘stay’ because she will just sit there until she’s asked to do something else, be it a release with ‘ok’ or whatever other command. I have said this before here but you want to be careful of doing too much steadiness work with her, ie slowing her down or stopping her just yet as you don’t want to kill her joy, but I think teaching a proper ‘sit’ to mean ‘actually sit down and don’t move until I say’ can’t hurt. Keep these sessions super short as it is tiring and you don't want her to get bored and 'fail' because she doesn't want to do it.
– ‘Look’ – super helpful! Just literally teaching her to look at you, so you reward for eye contact. You can start just sitting her opposite you and without a cue just reward her when she chooses to look at you. That graduates to her always checking in with you wherever she is when you’re out and about and just all comes together nearly as part of the engagement that you want.
– Introduction to hunting. This is very fun and will almost guarantee to tire her out as it's sniffy work. You can do it at home and you can do it out and about, basically anywhere and it’s not just a good exercise for future gundog work and hunting for balls/dummies (if you want to do that) but useful if they’re a bit whiny or need something to focus on for some reason. There are loads of exercises you can do but a good one to start with, which is also a recall drill, is to start with her sitting opposite you, and then throw a treat (that she can easily see) into the grass and ask her to find it. (You can add a hand signal into this and show her where it is – that in itself is really handy, I use hand signals with pupsy every day to direct her into cover or whatever.) When she’s found it and she looks back up at you throw another one the other way so she crosses your path and just repeat, going side to side in a zig zag. That’s level one – you graduate it into longer grass and harder places, and front and back and different directions, and move on to tennis balls or rabbit balls or dummies etc. But to begin with start near your feet so she learns that the fun comes from near you, as that bit is key.
– Introduction to retrieving. I’d be wary of steadying her too soon so with little retrieves – can be balled up socks or a puppy dummy or a rabbit ball, the last of which will be very sought after – just keep it fun and short. Do tiny little retrieves, 6 metres or so, literally mini, you can do it in the kitchen, in the garden, in a corridor (ideal as she can’t run off with it then as it’s a narrow space) and just encourage her for bringing it back and picking it up. Don’t worry about her delivering it to you in any fancy way as you can sort that later. Just reward her for bringing back and being enthusiastic about it. Let her jump on your knee saying ‘hi mum look what I got!!’ and, if she’s like mine, wrapping her legs around you in excitement. The goal is she picks up and brings back and does so with glee.
I also taught ‘this way’ as a turn command, which I coupled with the turn whistle (two pips), but ‘this way’ is fun for everyone. To teach it you can run around the garden/dog field changing directions and shouting ‘this way’ every time you do so that she learns to follow you. I use ‘this way’ every single day, it’s essential. It’s somewhere between a recall and a turn but it’s so handy – gets you out of trouble an awful lot as the dog moves towards you and perhaps comes in to you but if they don’t it’s not a failed recall because you just wanted them to turn and come in your direction.
Gundogs generally
I always talk about ‘working with’ my spaniel, and though they’re different breeds you can apply the same ideas. You can easily play lots of hide and seek – we do it around hay bales in fields – but also finding games so he gets that the fun comes from you and that he gets rewarded when he engages with you and not other dogs. With my girlie I drop balls and dummies in long grass when she’s not looking and then ask her to find them, always making sure she hasn’t spotted the drop so she gets a genuine prize from the game. When she was younger we used to do it when other dogs were approaching – I would send her away from me only slightly on a ‘job’ and then reward when she succeeded, which she would, as it would be an easy ‘job’. Then she began to associate other (strange) dogs approaching with ‘oh mum’s got a job for me’, and now that more or less translates to her turning round to see me, and ask for permission to approach or, more likely, dive into a hedge as she will choose pheasant scent over any dog any day.
In general I reward madly for every single good decision, be it with a treat or a little cuddle. She isn’t particularly food motivated and lots of dogs aren’t so sometimes I use a dummy retrieve as the reward too so she’s got to come back to me and then she gets rewarded again so it’s a virtuous circle.
A caveat to all of this is that I think a lot of it comes with age. I have worked a lot on our offlead heel and now, much to my surprise, she consistently offers the behaviour to me without being asked and we get through a lot more dog pate on walks now as I reward it every single time. I honestly reckon only about half of that is training and the rest is that she’s now 18.5 months and she’s grown up.