It has been months since I last posted into here.....the reason being that I haven't owned Ghillie since the beginning of this year.
I was out yesterday with her and her new owner plus that man's new lab puppy, now 4 months old.
The new owner is a bit younger than me and he is , whenever possible, a "positive" trainer. What he lacks is simply experience of working a gundog. He is a complete beginner and he comes complete with the usual questions asked by total newbies to gundogs.
Sometimes I forget how "green" I once was with gundog training but this man hasn't even been out shooting and is, therefor, even greener than I once was. He does "dummy work" with Ghillie almost every day and yet she hasn't really progressed from the standard she was at when I sold her.
This, as her owner is the first to point out , is entirely due to him and not to her. She is very, very willing to be "taught" but the man isn't very sure of how to make real progress. He has been going once a week to a trainer near him but says Ghillie is already "top of the class" and all he and she are doing there is marking time. The class trainer is working to the lowest common denominator in the class , not to the highest.
To be honest I don't feel the class trainer "knows" much more than his pupils. He too is a bit of a newbie to gundog training. As far as I am aware he has never won a test never mind a trial..... I don't think he has ever even competed in a test ? Ghillie's owner wants to compete in tests and trials too if possible. - - - - So I think he needs to change his trainer.
I'd love to help Ghillie's new owner but he lives an hour or more away from me and I think that for the most part yesterday, all I succeeded in doing was in confusing the poor man by telling him too much in one big lump ! Ghillie "lined up" for multiple retrieves perfectly when I tried it with her …..but not for her owner.
If I had the time with him I'd begin with "footwork" and body language . I tried to demo this yesterday and Ghillie co-operated almost perfectly …..with me ! It all seems to come so naturally to me that I had forgotten just how long it took me to develop my footwork and body language and make sure it was always consistent. I'd begin again with this man, one lesson at a time, until "footwork" was thoroughly understood by him. He is far from being a stupid man and Ghillie is very obviously keen to please him.....if only he could show her how to.
Her owner isn't helped by being caught between 3 different "methods" of dog training. He is getting advice from his local class trainer but that man is a bit too "old school" for my liking. He is getting advice from me ....but in lumps too big to easily consume and digest. I'm sort of partway between "old school" and "positive only." And he is getting advice from Pippa Mattison's book , which is heavily biased towards positive only.
The trouble with dog training books is that they just cannot cover all the nuances of dog behaviour ....and that the books authors are never there to sort out problems as they crop up.
Ghillie's owner could be a "taught" trainer of gundogs .....that applies to most people, but he does not seem to be an "instinctive" dog trainer.....not a natural born one. I will, I suppose, never know just how much I was taught by experience and "instinct" and how much I was taught by books and by other people. I can only say that things I thought were pretty obvious about dogs from a very early age, do not seem to be at all obvious to most other people. Then, of course, because I so easily knew what the dog was thinking and about to do.... I then fail to understand quickly enough that the dog's owner/trainer has failed to notice the little clues as to the dog's next most likely action.....and things go wrong !
I was lucky, I suppose, although I had no dog of my own when I was very young, I was interested enough in dogs to take out for "walks" any dog I could get my hands on. Once away from their owners house I began to try to train them no matter what age or breed they were .... poor dogs !
I really liked the 4 months old lab pup the man brought to our training session. The pup already walks to heel off lead and he loves retrieving just about anything. I can already see that although at present he retrieves to hand very well, he is very soon going to begin to perform run-pasts with dummies out of sheer joi-de-vivre if that is how you spell it !
Again the things this man's class trainer has told him to do had me either puzzled or annoyed. For instance he was told to train the pup stop to whistle by throwing tennis balls for him and then stopping him en route out to the balls using the whistle …..and force too presumably ? That is not how I'd begin training stop to whistle and I said so.
I mentioned memory retrieves for the puppy and his owner said he'd been told the pup was too young to do them. I disagree --- strongly ! Pups far younger than 4 months old can be taught memory retrieves provided "strict obedience" such as sitting, staying and walking to heel on or off-lead play no part in the training.
The pup ended up doing several memory retrieves yesterday of about 40 yards in a field he has never been within 60 miles of before. He did them easily and he did them well. His owner was told how to progress from there.
I "finished" my hour and a bit long training class yesterday by collapsing onto the grass but I still enjoyed being out with working gundogs again . It was worth collapsing for.
- - - - - Well -- - - that was a lot of writing about not much at all but it sometimes helps me to sort my thoughts out by writing about them.
Wullie
She now has him steady to throw and he has been taught by her to walk off lead and at heel away from the ball he has just seen thrown. He now walks better and far more calmly to heel for her than he ever did for me ! 
