I hope to see you at one of the training sessions. I hope you are open to discussions on your post. I can give you several reasons I don’t want my dog running the bank and discuss other assumptions posted. I will leave those kind of blog discussions for other websites.

Wishing it were training weather

Jim

I have a Cheaspeake and “Back to Basic” so far has been a great guide for training. The introduction story at the begin of this book really shows you how a hunting dog should be and how field trial dogs are more like robots. You have to decide if you want a hunting dog or robot dog. A field trial dog may take a great icey cold long water,..straight line retreive in late November only a few times until hypothermia symptoms set in. An non-Field Trail dog will do what comes naturally, which is to swim part of the way and get out of the water run along the bank until the dog is close to bird and go back into the cold water for the retreive. Difference is the hunting used his head and did not rely on his Master for direction. Keep in mind I am not talking about a blind retreive here..of course if this were a blind retreive the dog would need to be handled. “Back to Basics” does cover the blind and multiple retreiver training as well and recommends not using electric collars for training. Electric collar are great for professional dog trainer, but not the average hunter or someone tring to train just one dog. Electric collar in the average persons hand probably ruins more otherwise good dogs.

My 2 cents

Thanks,
Greg Bassham

We will be starting up training after our January 8 meeting. I expect we will have our first training day in January. Watch the website for dates.

Best of luck

Jim Thompson / Pres. Central Michigan HRC

I am training my first dog, a 20 month old black lab male. I am using Rick Stawski’s Fowl Dawg series of three DVDs and Mike Lardy’s Volume 1 notes. I am having good success with this. I also use a Tritronics Pro 500 e-collar.

Thanks
Greg