Originally Posted by
Lizzy23
I think you'll find that there are a fair few of us in this country that work our dogs, and actually most that have commented on this thread are open minded about it.
You asked about training for what you do without a collar, very basically its reward the good ignore the bad, accept that a dog and certainly a working dog is an intelligent being, and work with it.
I have a dog that came to me at sometime between 8 months and a year, she is the most driven dog i have ever seen, she has no interest in treats or toys, she lives to hunt, to the exclusion of anything else, its also taken her 5 years of being here to voluntarily go to my husband and ask for his attention, such was her lack of trust with people especially men, someone had hurt her and hurt her badly at some point, she associated people with fear.
She has worked on my shoot the last two seasons, and we've done it by patience, her reward is a kind word and a fuss on the chin, she adores been told she's good, i could have put a collar on her, after all i move in circles that has access, but i didn't, that would have destroyed her trust again, how did i do it, by hrs and hrs of repitition with a whistle, to me the quick fix that the collar would give wasn't worth the damage it would do to my dog, and my relationship with her was much more important.
The other dog that works we have had from a pup, and she's a cracking working dog, reliable in both the beating line and the picking up team, and we used rewards to train her, we used tennis balls to teach her quartering, hiding them left and right and getting her to find them, and started training retrieves, intitially with a ball, then moving on to Dummies, Rabbit skin diummies, and finally on to cold game before moving on to warm, again this was reward the good and ignore the bad, ie she did it well she was rewarded, if at any point she ran in the item that she was retrieving was removed game over, because lets face it its all a game to them.
I honestly think the difference between us is that you want perfection out of your dogs, me i'm willing to accept that my dogs will occasionally make mistakes after all they do have minds of their own thats why i love them, and before you say it, its up to me to manage where they make mistakes so that they're not in a situation thats threatening to their lives.
Lizzy, thank you for this post, your love of your dogs is very apparent. I hope you can find the time to wade thru the following.
I think one of the problems between us is that we are comparing apples and oranges with regard to the type of hunting we do. I believe you do driven shoots on upland game (which I have seen vids of), which is very different from what I have done for the past 37 years. Our seasons, combined, run from September thru April, and I am fortunate enough to be able to hunt at least 4-5 times a week throughout all of them; we start with geese in warm weather when the biggest potential problem is heat stroke, mostly fields with some water. We move on to ducks, which is mostly over water and is a split season. During the split we do pheasant and chukar, all upland, then another stretch of waterfowl (this one in full winter), and after that more upland. When those seasons close, we hunt pigeons and more recently have taken up crow hunting.
It would be safe for you to assume that, given the sheer amount and type of work we do, I have encountered many more situations with the potential for disaster (e.g., ice, strong water currents, etc.) than you have. Additionally, I have dogs that are very creative at finding unanticipated and unique ways to kill themselves (One of my bitches: "Wounded pigeon sitting on the gutter of a barn? No problem, I'll just climb to the top of the silage bunker that is the same height as the gutter, and jump across the 15' gap between the two, and add that bird to the dead one I already have in my mouth"; "Bird lands in the tiny bull's paddock, no sweat, I'll just jump this pesky 6' high stone wall that surrounds said paddock").
Lizzy, I never said I "expect" perfection, and I most certainly do not; but these are examples of situations where I do indeed have to
insist on it, because anything less could very likely result in something too awful to contemplate. I don't believe for a minute that you do not see that the very qualities which you most admire in your dogs, the drive and minds of their own, have the potential to get them killed in some situations, especially given the fact that you experienced such a situation yourself; you are far too intelligent and knowledgeable to have missed that fact.
I know what working with damaged dogs is like. My first retriever came to me at the age of two, toting a lot of baggage from her rotten prior life; I later had an even older one sent to me with even more severe trust issues than the first one. I had no problem getting either one to trust me, and it came quickly (the worst one turned around in two days). They initially continued to have reflexive responses to situations that had created the mistrust, but you could
see them stop and "say", "oh wait, you are not like the other idiot trainers I had", and recover and move on. These responses diminished dramatically with time.
Like you, I
teach in gradual steps, building on a sound foundation. One difference between our dogs seems to be that mine do not consider retrieving to be a game, to them it is very serious
business, right out of the gate. They could care less about food and praise when when hunting, I had two that would actually give one the stink eye and move away from a hand that was petting them when hunting, very obviously annoyed because the petting was interfering with their concentration on the task at hand.
The reward for them is the retrieve . When I
teach, I do not
allow a dog to make a mistake that results in the dog get rewarded with a completed retrieve, because the reward would
reinforce the mistake. I instead set things up so that the dog cannot complete the retrieve; i.e., make the right response easy and rewarding, and the wrong one difficult and and non-rewarding.
Some of you folks (generic you, Lizzy, does not include all of you) seem to assume that my collar training consists of slapping the collar on a 4 month old pup and happily zapping away (which is what some morons actually do as part of their "collar program"). First of all, I have no clue as to how you reached that conclusion if you had actually read and understood my posts (and if it is a case of not understanding, please do me the courtesy of asking for clarification, I am more than happy to provide it). Second, it is SOP for me to hunt my dogs as early as 5 months (in carefully controlled settings), and title them starting at 6 months (which is the youngest age at which they can run formal tests here). No collar involved at that point, just training as I described above.
Lastly, I guess most of you do not feel it is necessary to share the training method you would use to keep your dogs safe in the situations I have described because you have never encountered such situations. Well let me advise you folks, to never say never. If you do as I do with your dogs, and even if you do not and your dog's job of is strictly one of beloved pet and companion, it is entirely possible to experience a heart-stopping moment in everyday life; and it only takes one of them to kill your dog. The use of the collar allows me the option of doing something other than what Brierley described as "pray and hope", and dramatically increases the odds in favor of success; and
that, fellow dog lovers, is the primary reason that I have chosen to use it.