All continues to go well with Edge. Since his very first "mistake" inside the house on Saturday when we first got him , he has not peed or poo'd in the house again. He hasn't done either of those things in the kennel or run either , he saves it all up for the garden and he is just like a GSP I once had in his "dumping" style . The GSP wanted to always be on the move so he dropped his load as he moved..... Edge does the same so my kennel maid, alias The Soup Dragon, is kept nice and busy cleaning up after him.
So far he has chewed nothing in the house but I have given him a toy . It's just a strip of towel with a big knot tied in the middle but Edge likes to carry it around. Charlie and Libby are trying to get more attention by pinching his toy but Edge just ignores that and waits until they get bored with it before taking it again himself.
Libby is still in the huff at not being the focus of attention anymore and she does not play with Edge . This does not bother him at all, he makes no attempts to play with any of the dogs.....he seems to be a "person" pup. He spends most of his time in the house lying near my feet .....or on them if I will let him.
His favourite form of play with me is definitely retrieving .....he'll do anything to get a retrieve into his mouth including entering light cover.
Sometimes I find treats useful when training pups, especially for sits and recalls. I'm more than a little bit wary when using treats to encourage a recall however. If the pup gets the wrong idea it may drop dummies in expectation of a treat. If this happens it is mostly the trainers fault but I am not perfect ..... sometimes, try as I may, I get the timing of the treat wrong and then have to correct the fault of dropped dummies that I caused.
Edge had never had a treat in his short life until he came here. He would not accept or eat a treat unless it was in his dinner bowl. That is just beginning to change. He has now accepted a treat from my wife's hand and two treats from my hand so I will very soon begin training him to sit while using treats. I find a judicious mixture of pressing a pups backside down plus giving the pup a treat when that backside touches the floor usually begins to get the desired result rather quickly. I also give a lot of praise both vocal and physical for sitting on command.
When doing this I usually give a double command, I use a vocal command and a whistle command one after the other. To this is added a hand signal. All this done at once might be thought to confuse a pup but it doesn't seem to.
Very often it is my hand signal that the pup understands first , since dogs can't understand words anyway , it doesn't matter at all if a pup is taught an audible signal to sit which could be either a vocal one or a whistled one.....or both.
I find Edge to be a much "cannier" sort of pup than I'd expected. He likes people and he likes any form of play training. He is very good for a pup his age at giving me "focus." He is calm in the house but he sort of wakes up outside in the little strip of woods behind my house !
So far he has not seen a bird in those woods but I have a feeling I could control him if he did see one ..... I'm still uncertain about that.
I tried "hunting" him in the wood this morning and he was soon darting from side to side in response to my own movements. I will have to be careful not to use my hands much while doing this as he at once targets the hand and tries to get to it. So far his "quartering" distances are far better measured in feet than in yards and I am unsure whether to allow him to run with my other dogs. My cockers range very widely and if Edge decides to follow Libby the brittany he'll end up back doon in England !
There is very little chance of him encountering a rabbit in the woods and fields around here, even experienced dogs only find one or two per year each in most of the places I can hunt. If he sees a bird things could get a bit exciting but he will soon be taken further afield where there is more cover and more likelihood of him seeing birds..... I cannot keep him wrapped up in cotton wool forever.
A couple of pics of him retrieving from light cover in the wood this morning. He didn't hesitate for an instant to enter the cover for this large home made dummy.
Wullie
