delivery issues

[trekmoor]

Aye - stop keeping us all hanging in suspenders !

I often have trouble with deliveries to hand and I am finding it difficult to do things like bending or crouching over to accept deliveries now. I have been experimenting with my 4 months old lab pup .... I've been teaching her to rear up and place her front paws on me and then to give me the dummy. Not sure how long I will keep doing this as I think she will knock me over once she gets a bit bigger !
Years ago I trained one of my labs to rear up and drop retrieves straight into my game bag but I did that just for fun.

I am always a bit wary of using treats to achieve a delivery to hand. It seems to make some pups anticipate the food treat and drop the dummy to get the treat even if I then withhold the treat. I admit that my timing is probably at fault even if I do not use the treat by showing it to the pup.
The only time treats worked well for me for delivery purposes was when I clicker trained the delivery .........which makes me think I have given vocal praise a few seconds too early and I don't use vocal praise when training this with a clicker.

I find that sitting myself down on a log or something similar and accepting the dummy from that position often works very well provided the pup is given praise as it climbs up on me before I take the dummy from it. From there I crouch with my back to a wall or fence or tree and gradually raise my height against the backstop. Again I let the pup climb up on me and give it some praise prior to taking the dummy.

Never snatch at a dummy in a dogs mouth....it can spit out faster than you can snatch !

Wullie

[Blackjaw]

This guy goes through a series of 'hold videos' that is basically what I do to teach hold. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8qwY9FJCQ

[Nickheref]

I anticipate getting howls of protest from what I am about to say but having watched this (and other videos) on the same topic my thoughts are these, dogs that tend to spit out dummies, drop them or have major retrieving issues do so for one of two reasons
1 Something has been done in their training that encouraged it or made it happen(kids and balls, etc)
2 The dog has a temperament issue

If 1 then fine sort the problem out and don't let it happen with the next pup.

I have trained quite a few springers, not as many as the pros but more than the average gundog owner and have only had 2 with issues of holding dummies without any major training to do so, usually if they do drop it just taking a step back and asking them to bring it on, doing that a couple of times gives them the message that they hold it until I accept it, the two that this simple and quick (and dare I say force free ) method did not work with had many other issues and were to my mind pretty poor animals, these same dogs also had problems with water etc etc. Put another way - if you have to spend days or months getting a dog to do something that the majority of dogs do quickly and without much fuss (see Trekmoor's posts about Ghillie and swimming) why bother? Fine if it is your only dog but the danger to my mind comes later. If these same dogs get bred from, having required months of careful training to get them to the same stage as a better dog achieved in 10 minutes are we are merely hiding/masking the issues and compounding the problem for the future?

I have put on my flak jacket and am retreating to my bunker

[Judy]

I think its almost invariably the handers, the problem isn't restricted to Springers its universal. If the unthinking handler says "good dog" before the dummy is to hand then the dog will drop it, if the hander insists on a sit the pup will often drop the dummy rather than multitask (of course bitches are, arguably, better at a sitting delivery), if the handler picks the dummy up off the ground then throws again they have reinforced the dropping. Pups are pretty hardwired to chase and bring things back, the pup doesn't know the last step is to give it back to hand.

The reason I resorted to teaching my version of the hand touch this time was because I balls up her retrieving by shouting at one of the other dogs who ran in on the little toy the pup and I were playing with. Took me a couple of weeks to reassure her that retrieving was great and a week or two of feeding bits and pieces from my hand before going back to a retrieve but asking for the delivery. Of course you could always use the method I saw a so called pro trainer use, smack the dog across the muzzle every time it dropped the dummy pick dummy up chuck a few feet, smack dog across muzzle etc.. You would have liked to be a fly on the wall there too, Naj.

[Nickheref]

I do differentiate between holding onto dummies and giving them to you, I have had rather more youngsters who want to hold onto the dummy and do a lap of honour or just keep if for themselves but that is a much easier fix (or at least it is to me) than dogs which drop or spit out the dummy. Similarly I am not terribly keen on dogs who are very "dummy specific" prefering those that will carry pretty much anything - my current youngster likes banana skins, any dummy, bones, plant pots, the odd interesting stick, polythene bags, beer cans and anything else that takes her fancy.

Edited as things are a bit quiet today so I have watched the rest of the series on this dog and "hold conditioning" and in the last one at about 1 minute 50 seconds it was summed up for me when the trainer points out that the dog sitting in front of him with the retrieve is not looking at him but has it's head down - for which I read as - deliberately not meeting his eyes. For me any dog who has got to that age and cannot meet your gaze has either been messed about or more likely what are now termed "issues" but in my rather old fashioned way think of as simply not willing to please enough or onside.

[trekmoor]

I'm another one that thinks the various delivery problems among dogs are usually the fault of the trainer , or of the training method used on an individual pup. I freely admit to having had delivery problems with my last 3 pups ..... That is "Ghillie" the lab pup , Edge the springer pup just prior to me getting Ghillie and my last Brittany "Libby." I was unable to do the things I'd done in the past like crouching low to receive dummies and all of those pups did not really begin to give good deliveries until I sat down to receive them.

All 3 pups/dogs came good in the end mainly due, I think, to me having changed my delivery stance from upright to sitting (the crouch position I used to be able to do.) I have a feeling too many inexperienced trainers focus too much on getting the dummy back into their hands and not enough focus is given to just praising the pup as it delivers it. The tendency for most people is to grab at the dummy ............a very big mistake !

I have mixed feelings about this quote "2 The dog has a temperament issue"...... I had problems galore when training my very first Brittany to retrieve. I'd noticed when she was 8 -12 weeks old that she retrieved "naturally" so as soon as her injections were over with I concentrated on hunting, hunting and more hunting with no more retrieving given. That was a very bad mistake. Brittanies always want to hunt anyway ! I tried her with a retrieve when she was 5 months old and she point blank refused to have anything to do with it. In fact she wouldn't even look at it.

She never retrieved another thing until I shot a couple of birds from one of her points, she instantly went out and collected those birds. She was a "natural" but I'd come very close to just giving her away because she would not retrieve dummies. She won trials and she is still, about 30 years later, the only brit to have ever won an award in the HPR championships.

I do agree with Nickheref that if a pup/dog really needs to have specialised training done with it for retrieving or just about anything else that should come "naturally" then that dog should not be bred from. Hiding a fault does not make the fault vanish from the gene pool. Please be sure that the fault lies with the dog though and not with the trainer or with the method of training.

If I really needed to either clicker train a dog or F.F. it in order to get a retrieve or a delivery , I would not breed from that dog.

Wullie

[Nickheref]

Apologies Trekmoor, I wasn't really meaning Brittanys etc, more springers and labs (possibly cockers) the vast majority of which get on with it but to me if you have to sit a dog on a place board 4 foot off the ground with it's head held up by a lead (as he says to stop it throwing it about but really to prevent it avoiding holding the dummy) and have do this for a couple of weeks just to get it to hold onto a dummy it is not the sort of dog I want to work with as there are probably other things waiting just around the corner and the "hold" is just a symptom of the dogs general demeanour

[Blackjaw]

I have seen puppies drop the dummy out of excitement, turn around a tear off out to where the dummy was originally thrown. I don't think this was caused by any type of training error? As to the dog not meeting the handlers gaze when delivering, I think this may, in some cases, be a bit of a possessiveness issue on the part of the dog that needs to be sorted out.

I also realize that what works for some people might not work for others, or what might work for one dog might not work for another so it is great to have several different ways to approach a problem. My dad was always fond of the old saying 'there is more than one way to peel a banana' and that is definitely the case with dog training.

[trekmoor]

No apologies needed Nickheref. I hadn't even looked at the vid ! I don't much like seeing dogs trained from placeboards as if they were animals in a circus..... which is, I think, where the placeboard training ideas originally came from ? The placeboard , for those animals, becomes a "safe" place ? Or perhaps a "situational behaviour" place ?

I just know I've never needed to train dogs by using one although I do make use of various natural features such as fallen trees I can sit on while accepting retrieves. I do use forms of situational behaviour when training pups the retrieve. This usually begins with me sitting on the 3-4 steps leading from the garden into my house while tossing objects into the garden for the puppy. Most pups grab the object and then head for their "safe place" inside the house. They encounter me on the steps and , after a wee while, I become the safe place to take things to.

Doing this has worked very well for every spaniel , retriever and HPR I have trained whether the pup belonged to me or to friends having difficulties.

As Blackjaw said "There's more than one way to peel a banana !"

Wullie

[Naj]

I anticipate getting howls of protest from what I am about to say but having watched this (and other videos) on the same topic my thoughts are these, dogs that tend to spit out dummies, drop them or have major retrieving issues do so for one of two reasons
1 Something has been done in their training that encouraged it or made it happen(kids and balls, etc)
2 The dog has a temperament issue

If 1 then fine sort the problem out and don't let it happen with the next pup.

I have trained quite a few springers, not as many as the pros but more than the average gundog owner and have only had 2 with issues of holding dummies without any major training to do so, usually if they do drop it just taking a step back and asking them to bring it on, doing that a couple of times gives them the message that they hold it until I accept it, the two that this simple and quick (and dare I say force free ) method did not work with had many other issues and were to my mind pretty poor animals, these same dogs also had problems with water etc etc. Put another way - if you have to spend days or months getting a dog to do something that the majority of dogs do quickly and without much fuss (see Trekmoor's posts about Ghillie and swimming) why bother? Fine if it is your only dog but the danger to my mind comes later. If these same dogs get bred from, having required months of careful training to get them to the same stage as a better dog achieved in 10 minutes are we are merely hiding/masking the issues and compounding the problem for the future?

I have put on my flak jacket and am retreating to my bunker

especially the breeding bit!

I once listened to Erlandson discussing this topic with a group of triallers back in the 70s. He was a great fan of Hales Smut but many disliked him because they believed he passed on retrieving problems along with the fire. Whatever, Erlandson surprised everybody when he said he never persevered with a reluctant retriever but gave them one chance then didn't waste any more time on them. He wanted natural retrievers not dogs that you had to spend hours on developing some sort of retrieve in them.

Naj