So my dog isn't the best at picking up ducks and getting a goose wrestled in this past season is a whole other story.  After running a couple marks this past weekend I decided this week I would focus on trying to fix this problem.  Force fetching him was a breeze so taking this next step should be easy right... wrong!!!

I started small with frozen quail.  That went pretty well.  Since it's difficult to hold a quial the "wrong" way due to size he did what he was supposed to and followed the rules like delivering to hand and so on.  Tuesday night I switched to ducks and things started to unravel a bit.  Wednesday was worse and the first part of tonight's session totally sucked!

Ugggghhh.  I had such a clear picture in my head of what I wanted to accomplish this week and this "stupid" dog just wasn't cooperating.  Then it occured to me maybe it was more of a "stupid" novice wantabe trainer problem who wasn't trying to figure out what the dog was thinking and how to better accomplish the goal.  After paying attention to the little things he was doing it was apparent he was trying to tell me he was confused and my methods weren't working.  To say he wasn't having fun would be a gross understatement.  That's strange for him because normally he wants to jump out of his skin when he knows it's time for some retrieves.

So I switched it up.  No more rules (steadyness or even healing) for the session- just happy bumper type with a big fat frozen drake.  I also became incrediably enthusiastic to get him really excited about it.  So what happened?  Magically after a couple playful retrieves he was picking up ducks the right way and in a hurry to do it.  Why?  I think because he wanted to hurry up and get it back to me for some more fun.  Finally it seemed like we made some progress tonight.  Maybe a stupid dog can learn something afterall.

Tomorrow I'll start out with the fun style and attempt to start putting some of the rules back in to see what happens. Hopefully it goes well!  Just thought I'd share tonight's expereince because for me it reinforces how much benefit can come from just paying attention to the dog and not making it more complicated than it should be.

Sometimes when Force Fetch  goes to easy, problems will pop up, Shoot him some fliers, I would bet those get him going.....

  

Perfect. A big, gold star. Now everyone can tell you what you should have done, but you made a big step forward in thinking. Nice!

Man can I relate. I never even thought or heard of reading the dog before this pup. I had some issues with various things and in the past just gave in and lived with certain aspects I figured I couldnt change. With a couple of tasks my dog would fail and when I pressured him he would try to snuggle up to my leg and look up at me. I know one of my faults is being big on instant gratification, so I worked on other items and now that he is a little older I went back to work on the past failures and everything just fell in to place. I was pushing to hard with too young of a dog. I know now what I was seeing was confusion on the dogs part of what I was asking, yet he was still intent on trying to please me. I would have had better dogs in the past if I would have taken more time learning the dog instead of trying to force it. Nice job on changing it up for success.

A very valuable lesson to learn. Learn to think like a dog an life will be much easier for you and your dog. Teach the way they learn not the way we think they should. Another extremely important concept MAKE IT FUN! Don't take your dog to the rock pile to make smaller rocks and expect them to love it. The type of relationship you have with your dog is a huge deal. Major affect on all the training you will do with them. Teach them that good things and success happen when they are around you.

Gary

PRG