Cool-off Drill

When a dog is hot, the dog's desire for comfort, and perhaps even her instinct for self-preservation, can draw her to a pool or pond where she can lie in the water and cool off. For some dogs, this can occur in during a land retrieve that happens to be in the vicinity of water, interrupting the return and possibly getting the dog disqualified from the event.

The purpose of the Cool-off Drill is to condition the dog to have a preference for completing the retrieve, rather than interrupting the retrieve to go for a swim, even when she's hot and the nearby water looks highly tempting.

The Cool-off Drill can be done as part of a regular private or group training session, as long as land work comes first.

Here's what the first session of the Cool-off drill looks like:

1. Train on land enough to get the dog reasonably hot. Allow the dog all the water she wants to drink, but don't let her go swimming.
2. Place an LP and WB a few yards from the corner of a pond.
3. Place the SL so that the line to the LP skirts the pond within a few yards. For the first session, make the distance from the SL to LP short enough that the dog will recall without fail on the retrieve.
4. Using normal line mechanics, send the dog to pick up the bumper, then call her back.
5. As soon as she returns, take the bumper as quickly as possible and throw it as far into the pond as possible, sending her the instant it touches water, or even while it's still in the air. This step is the dog's reinforcement for completing the retrieve, and you want to make it more desirable than a detour to cool off on the way back would have been, so make this step as exciting and valuable to the dog as possible.
6. Since the dog is now cooled off, repeating the drill during this session may not be particularly productive, so continue the training session with whatever other training objectives you and the group have planned.

In future sessions, gradually increase the distance from the SL to the LP, and vary how much of the time the dog is near the water, since the dog could face either situation in an event: a retrieve where she's near water most of the run, or a retrieve where she's only near water for a short part of the run.

As with any raising in criteria, it's neither necessary nor desirable for each trial to be harder than the last. Preferably, some trials will be easier than the last, some will be harder, but the trend will be toward more and more difficult trials, which in this case means longer and longer distances from the SL to the LP.

The goal would be to build to a high degree of difficulty, for example: In warm weather, the dog runs a triple, quad, or quintuple retrieve near water but without getting wet, the last retrieve featuring a line of 200 yards or more that comes within a few feet of a pond or runs beside a pond the entire way.

In an event, you probably won't actually be able to swim the dog immediately after completing a Cool-off type retrieve, but hopefully you will have an opportunity to swim the dog, perhaps in the water series, soon afterwards.