Darned good call, Naj. What was it, 6-7 years ago, that a top dog got the heave from the IGL champs when one bird fell atop another and the dog retrieved both simultaneously? Thought that a rather harsh penalty to pay for a cracking job retrieving.
Meanwhile, on our side, swapping is called "switching" and gets tested in both trials and tests by use of "poison birds," the picking of which, as opposed to the retrieve the dog's originally been sent for, also results in disqualification.*
Naj wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2018 11:44 am
Multiple rewards to choose from and a lack of or breakdown in training. It’s a normal part of distraction proofing the retrieve to train the dog to deliver what is in its mouth regardless of returning through scattered dummies or seeing them flying through the air. In the field, however, a dog could be on its first retrieve and have a bird shot within clear sight and its first instinct might well be to spit out what is in its mouth and run over or just run over and swap birds. Or it might be out of sight and returning with a retrieve when it comes upon another bird and swaps without you knowing and you have a developing problem. This is hard to replicate with dummies and often hard to immediately intervene with in the shooting field so a problem behaviour easily develops in the context of picking up. That’s why it pays to very carefully introduce a young dog to picking up and be very selective in when you send it to retrieve until confidence in reliability builds.
MG
* For your edification, Naj, the cat pee smell of a Dokken - if such lumps of plastic were used in our tests and trials - would never entice a dog into making a mistake with a retrieve. In fact, quite the opposite when they
were used 12-15 years ago by a gundog org. during an outbreak of avian influenza that prevented actual birds as fare. Ask me how I know this
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