The use of the word 'stay'

[chunky]

Hi Duke ,

don't be disheartened about your first training session in all honesty i would find it worrying that your dog would not be easily distracted at a young age, if i were you carry on training on a one to one basis butyou really need to put your dog in a social circle with other dogs otherwise it can be possible to end up with a dog that dislikes other dogs and may show agression and in time your dog will become so focused on you that it will more than likely try to dodgeother dogs that it knows well and has played with whilst a puppy just to bring you the ball back so you can throw it again,and when this happens you feel a bit more in control of your dog and you seem to relax more and concentrate on other areas of training and honing the skills.

how is your dog getting on so far with your 1 to 1 training? it will get easier,
we did 6 week puppy school with our dog and to be honest the only thing that she was bad on was heel work. but what we did notice was that she was starting to get a bit bolder with other dogs, we then stopped training classes as we were on a waiting list for the kennel club.when we started going to the next training sessions she was a nightmare she would pull ,bark sniff the floor where other dogs have been if she caught sight of the missus she would pull to get to her but we stuck with it every week.
the turning point came around the 6 week mark when she focused more and thats probaly due to training retreives with small dummys and getting her to hup etc.
Hopefully this weekend i might do a training video and post it.

saturday's beat went well plenty of banter and taking the rise out of the guns for the missed shots of phezzie and hare of course the beaters and dogs did superb justa shame the guns kept forgetting that their safety catches were on

and yep those first 2 pints did not touch the sides of my gullet and the following 5 pints did'nt do too bad either, a neighbouring shoot came into the pub to anounce a hundred bird day

i must admit it made our 5 phezzie i missed hare and one dead 3 day old rabbit that one of the dogs proudly appeared with out of a hedgerow looking like it had a french stick in its gob look a little crap really but never mind i still had a good day and managed to bag a hen phezzie for home.

Thehighlight of the day for me was a new dog on the beat owned by one of the guns sons who acquired a small 3 year oldblack working cocker bitch that has been trained on shoots and he has only owned this dog for 6 days and watching him work his first gundog with a little coaching from the old owner was a superb thing to see, and in time he will hone his skills and be an extremely good dogs man without a doubt.

[duke]

Hi mate,

Our 1 to 1 sessions are working well, we are about 3 weeks in now and training everyday for short periods when i can fit them in, and at the weekends doing more longer sessions 20 - 30 mins but throwing some fun in there so it still breaks it up for her and keeps it interesting. She already new how to sit so all i had to do was choose a whistle command to go with it (Which at the moment i think im regretting as its too much of a long beep, ah well!). Her recall was shocking, now its improved loads and she now knows when i say 'meg, come here' i actually mean come here in front of me, i introduced the whistle at the same time as improving her recall and witin the first session she had learnt the recall whistle, which is great, shes a fast learner. Only problem is its hard to hold back from moving onto the next thing too fast. We are now working on Heel and Stop, her heel work is coming on fine, we only had around 20 mins total on heel work but its coming on nicely, although i must use food, i've stopped using it as a lure now and i can say 'meg, heel' and tap my left thigh 2 times and she will heel for a treat, im also throwing in some fuss as a reward too as it will become easier for me to phase the food out later, i'm also working on getting her into the heel position using your method with food in both hands and make her come down my right leg and round to my left and sit, only tried this once and to be honest i think it will be easy for her to learn and in a session or two we should have it, not perfect but she will know, do you use a command when getting her into heel? Or is it just the motion you do with your hand/arm? I'm not training her for trial just for field so perfection is not all important as long as the little bugger will do what i say!.. Her stop isn't great, mostly because i have no idea how to train it! We haven't spent much time with it either.

I've decided to stick with 1 on 1 for now and do groups later, she has been socialised a lot and we did attend some group training sessions with another trainer (although he wasn't a gun dog trainer) and she did great and she came along nicely, she used to bark and growl at dogs and after 4 sessions she was 'fixed' haha! The group i attended on sunday was good but for her too many distractions! She wanted to play with every dog! Every dummy that was thrown she wanted to retrieve, even though it wasn't her turn. If i throw a fun retieve and make her sit and wait until i tell her to fetch she will but if theres other dogs if i say sit she will sit and 1 second later she will be already well on her way to retrieving that dummy! Its as though she doesn't want to share, it has to be hers and no other dogs, shes the same at home verry obsessed over yet toys, if my BC goes to one, she will swoop in pick up every toy she can see and but them in her bed and lay on them so the BC cant get them... Is there something wrong there? I think there is... how can that be fixed?

Sounds like you had a great day beating, lots of laughs by the sound of it. 100 birds is impressive from the other shoot to say its nearly the end of season. Although 5 Phezzies is better than none! I laughed loads when you mentioned the dog with the 3 day old rabbit lol! My otehr half was like.. Whats up with you! How old was the kid working the cocker bitch?

[chunky]

Hi Duke
Your training sessons sound as though they are progressing really well how old is your dog again? when i calll my dog to heel which is usually the whistle (3 short peeps) i then motion with my arm to my left side and she will heel to my left sometimes it may have to re-inforced with the spoken word heel, or if we are out walking on the lead and if she breaks forward i tell her heel.

Now that you have your dog is recognising that a long peep on the whistle means stop/hup a good bit of training is to whistle a long peep when walking on the lead when stopping at the kerb to cross the road. One thing that you should be aware of when teaching the whistle stop is that when your........sorry hang on i will finish this post in a bit my dinner is ready

[duke]

Hi Chunky

Shes 1 year old. I think i need to remind her what the sit and recall whistle is lol she was terrible tonight. How long of a peep do you use ive been using a quite long one, which she knows is sit... but dont know whether ive gone OTT!

Its strange its almost as if shes gone backwards :s

That training video you meantioned would be a treat btw! No pressure
Ill post a quick video this weekwend to show you my progress and my OTT whistle for sit