Need help, newcomer with a hard headed springer

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Hi all thanks for your responses! I will reply in order received.

Naj , thanks. Yes I agree the boundries were not set and I cant expect him to know that things have suddenly changed. It was probably my biggest mistake to let him run free at all. Ive been trying to instill boundries with a check cord. The problem is, how do I test him? If the training hasnt set in and I let him of the cord, he is at a huge risk of being flattened on the road. Ive been trying to find a large fenced in area, but its not easy to find. I have several great UK training manuals. I have read all 3 of Joe Irvings books, I Own David Lissets and Simon Tyres DVDs as well as one from martin deeley.

Helen, Hi thanks again for all your help. Its pretty deflating when someone tells you your dog is basically "defective"! I will certainly get to work on the eye contact. I also am in the process of building a pigeon loft and trying to acquire some pigeons. He seemed to respond to the clipped wing yesterday...

Vicky,thanks for the reassurance. Yes he has a TON of drive. great physical ability as well. I just need to learn to Harness it if at all possible. I have an outdoor kennel and He sleeps in a crate at night inside. I will say that I am probably guilty of having him in the house altogether way to much! hes actually quite nice inside, its just once he gets into the fields. I've tried tennis balls many, many times, he could care less if hes out there.

WGD I found some of your previous post when I was Digging around and thats what prompted me to join here. Its nice to have someone who has had a similar situation. Yes , you can almost see the change, like you said aptly "the red mist comes down" he gets out where the is game scent and everything goes out the window. Thanks though I will just have to work my ass off, and agreed, if I can solve it I think he can be one hell of a dog.

seppi. I am not trying to blame anyone else. I only even brought up the breeding because the second "Robinsmoor frolic" came out of my mouth, the trainer dropped his whistle and looked me dead in the face with a look that said "your ******" . If I wanted to just blame the dog and take the easy way out, he'd of been sent off with the trainer getting shocked half to death a month ago. The fact that I am here asking total strangers for advice should be testament that I know I need to be better in order to train this dog. I am on here because I am trying to AVOID the collar at all costs.

cass, Agreed but I respect his opinion. he a pretty good one

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wullie,
Thanks. I trust the trainer alot and thats why im pretty torn up about it. hahah 20 feet sounds pretty good to me! I will bust my ass to try to make him a good one.

[Rothievale]

It's not the dogs breeding that's at fault, or anyone else. The responsibility for basic obedience sits firmly with you.

The basic fundamentals of pet obedience are missing. Recall is a necessity, regardless of whether the dog is to be a gun dog or not.

"At only 3 and 4 months he would run off on his own"

"Newcomer with hard headed springer" Dogs fault?

"under the advice of some of the professional trainers" Trainers fault?

"the culprit is the bitches father" Poor bugger is getting the blame and he's been deed for donkeys years.

Sounds like you are going to give the lecky collar a go now. No doubt it will get the blame for something soon.

Take responsibility and learn how to connect with a dog, read a dog, and recognise the warning signs of something going awry.

Kick the poor guy while he's down, he tried to listen to trainers advice when the pup was just a baby and they all said let him have his head. So if you're new and you ask advice from the pros and that's what they say then what are you supposed to do? Not all spaniels are like this, I have experienced this bloodline first hand and they are a handful, self employed, not for a novice. Do you know many pups that will bugger off at 12 weeks old, regardless of their up upbringing?! I don't. He has recognised the warning signs, he doesn't exercise the pup in the open anymore after the buggering off incidences, he has had it on a long line. He is worried and wanting to do the right thing. I have had people come to me with buggering off spaniels at 2 years old, they have been doing it for a year of more. This young dog is only 7 months old, all credit to Bret for seeking help now and before now. It is so difficult when you are a novice, who do you listen to?

[Rothievale]

I've an 8 year old bitch with Robinsmoor Frolic not too far back in her breeding, she's the fastest, hardest going, best game finder in the kennel... she's also a completely selfish, hard headed, defiant shite of a dog. I made plenty of mistakes with her but I don't know even if I got her again now whether I could make a job of her.

I wish you the very best of luck, and warn you it will be a long road ahead. In my experience, the advice will be plentiful and varied. Few will really know what you are up against unless they have experienced a dog like this first hand, and there aren't that many around.

All I would say is go very, very slowly and you must train on game as that is where the red mist comes down and the dog works for itself and becomes impossible to hold. Guessing, I would think my dog would have been ready to be shot over about three years old with training drilled in to the point of boredom. If you get it right you'll have a hell of a dog.

Yup, I had a robinsmoor granddaughter and she was a selfish hard headed bitch of a dog but she loved to retrieve so I was able to work away with her and even managed a couple of seconds in trials with her but she could NEVER be trusted in cover, dishonest and self employed but extremely talented. I know I made her harder by letting her away with things as a baby when she was my first dog to train. My biggest mistake was listening to pro trainers who told me to let her chase in the rabbit pen. I didn't want to as I knew she had a hard temperament but they didn't believe me and made me feel like an over exaggerating woman. Well they soon realised that she was and we spent a whole year trying to steady her after that and I WISH I hadn't listened to them. She could well have been a ftch and is in fact mother to a ftch and grandmother to another ftch, she was worth breeding from....carefully.

I have every faith that Bret with persevere with this dog, it's a matter of finding what makes him tick but it will be a long road, I wish him luck. Certainly the next spaniel he gets will be so easy in comparison, the hard ones to train teach you everything.

[seppi]

It's not the dogs breeding that's at fault, or anyone else. The responsibility for basic obedience sits firmly with you.

The basic fundamentals of pet obedience are missing. Recall is a necessity, regardless of whether the dog is to be a gun dog or not.

"At only 3 and 4 months he would run off on his own"

"Newcomer with hard headed springer" Dogs fault?

"under the advice of some of the professional trainers" Trainers fault?

"the culprit is the bitches father" Poor bugger is getting the blame and he's been deed for donkeys years.

Sounds like you are going to give the lecky collar a go now. No doubt it will get the blame for something soon.

Take responsibility and learn how to connect with a dog, read a dog, and recognise the warning signs of something going awry.

Kick the poor guy while he's down, he tried to listen to trainers advice when the pup was just a baby and they all said let him have his head. So if you're new and you ask advice from the pros and that's what they say then what are you supposed to do? Not all spaniels are like this, I have experienced this bloodline first hand and they are a handful, self employed, not for a novice. Do you know many pups that will bugger off at 12 weeks old, regardless of their up upbringing?! I don't. He has recognised the warning signs, he doesn't exercise the pup in the open anymore after the buggering off incidences, he has had it on a long line. He is worried and wanting to do the right thing. I have had people come to me with buggering off spaniels at 2 years old, they have been doing it for a year of more. This young dog is only 7 months old, all credit to Bret for seeking help now and before now. It is so difficult when you are a novice, who do you listen to?

I'm not kicking the guy. He's not looking to win a field trial or even work his dog as a gun dog yet. He'simply trying to get it to a point where it doesn't pass off every time he takes the lead off. That is basic dog training. The fact his pup is a few generations down the line from some stubborn dogs is neither here nor there. Brad isn't quartering or hunting the dog through game crops with scent here, there and everywhere. He's taking the lead off and it's doing one.

You said yourself you took advice and acted on it even though you knew better. Sometimes folk should just trust themselves more, take advice by all means and from all corners but sometimes you have to just trust yourself and get on with a plan to overcome a problem.

[trekmoor]

The less experience you have of a breed or of choosing a training method best suited to an individual dog the more difficult it becomes to choose the right litter to take a pup from . The O.P. has, I.M.O. , made a mistake in his choice of litter but I would bet he is not the only one on this forum to have done that ! I have done the same thing and more than once too. I have also done this from both ends of the "go" v. "sluggish" spectrum of working behaviours. I've had pups, in particular a Brittany, that was a bog-off little cow right from the first time she was let off lead in the countryside at 11-12 weeks old . She had no interest in me whatsoever once off-lead, she just took off hunting and I had a hell of a job catching her again.

That pup showed me how bad a real bog-off sort of pup can be .....she was just too self confident . I owned her grand dam and she was very easy to train by comparison . I trained the pups dam too and she was an easy dog to train . I thought the grand pup would be similarly easy but the sire used to produce the pup put too much self confidence to hunt into her. That pup never did become a gundog . I handed her back over to her owner and was very pleased to do so ! Maybe she could have been trained using an e-collar but although I am a fairly experienced gundog trainer I do not think I could have trained her without one.

Unless you have had a pup/dog like that one to train you may think you could train that sort of pup .....but there are degrees of the bog-off trait in dogs and pups like her are at the top end of the degree scale, fortunately for us such pups are fairly rare.

Beginners often do their very best to get advice on training but not only do they lack experience of dogs, they also lack enough experience to reliably choose trainers who are not feeding them a load of crap.

Like Helen (Rothievale) my heart goes out to the O.P. and also like Helen, I think the following quote from her is very true........." Certainly the next spaniel he gets will be so easy in comparison, the hard ones to train teach you everything."

Wullie

[Cynic]

Just bad Luck and move on then . Or train it?

[seppi]

The less experience you have of a breed or of choosing a training method best suited to an individual dog the more difficult it becomes to choose the right litter to take a pup from . The O.P. has, I.M.O. , made a mistake in his choice of litter but I would bet he is not the only one on this forum to have done that ! I have done the same thing and more than once too. I have also done this from both ends of the "go" v. "sluggish" spectrum of working behaviours. I've had pups, in particular a Brittany, that was a bog-off little cow right from the first time she was let off lead in the countryside at 11-12 weeks old . She had no interest in me whatsoever once off-lead, she just took off hunting and I had a hell of a job catching her again.

That pup showed me how bad a real bog-off sort of pup can be .....she was just too self confident . I owned her grand dam and she was very easy to train by comparison . I trained the pups dam too and she was an easy dog to train . I thought the grand pup would be similarly easy but the sire used to produce the pup put too much self confidence to hunt into her. That pup never did become a gundog . I handed her back over to her owner[/b

Wullie

Bit confused with that one. If you picked the pup, how come you handed it back to the owner.

Good luck Brad.

[Cass]

cass, Agreed but I respect his opinion. he a pretty good one

Understandable but its amazing how dogs can react to different people. Does not mean he's a bad trainer. Dogs connect to different people. Perhaps you could PM your reservations about using a collar. I have a cocker and live North of you, and I will assure you, more people than you think on both sides of the border use them. For some reason spaniel folks over here don't like admitting they use them because a few old folks demonize them. Most spaniels competing at high levels use a collar in training. We don't use them in quite the same way as the retriever folks, but for dogs with a super soft temperament like a spaniel they are a godsend. Much less pressure than physically correcting a dog, and much more effective in regards to timing. Your best bet is to get out with a training group - you'll learn a ton.

[Judy]

Find something the dog really loves like cheese, dried liver, frankfurter, start in the yard with the dog on a long line and practise recalls, sits, stays, lie down, rewarding every little bit of progress, build it up until the dog starts to think there might be something in listening to his owner. Don't let him practise b'ing off ever again.

Unless and until you've had a dog like this you have no idea just how difficult some dogs can be and it often runs in lines, reappearing from time to time. As Trekmoor said, you will learn much more from this kind of dog than from an easy one!

Ooo, Cass! A dog with a super soft temperament shouldn't need correction! Unless its both soft and unwilling but that's a whole different ball game to the nutty bold ones.