The Rule for Points

Note: Based on follow-up correspondence with Alice Woodyard, this post contains several errors.  I will attempt to revise the material in the near future.


Note: Laddie is a male, so I use the pronoun "he" when referring specifically to him.  But when I am speaking in general, I use "he" to refer to the handler, "she" to refer to the dog.

In a young dog being trained for water retrieves, a single rule should apply to virtually every retrieve: If the choice is between water and land, always take the water. If you are in a training situation where the group has set up a retrieve that doesn't follow that rule with a dog new to handling, my suggestion would be to modify the way you run that retrieve so that that rule can be honored. Getting on points is the dog's natural tendency, and you want the dog to have months of experience of not getting on points when swimming near them.

However, at some point in the dog's career, perhaps after the dog has her SH, you may want to train her a more sophisticated rule, which I'll call the Rule for Points: Always prefer the water unless handled onto a point. Obviously, in that case, we want the dog to readily accept that handling.

To a human, the Rule for Points seems pretty straightforward, but as I learned with Laddie, the "unless" part can be quite frustrating. At least I assume that "frustrating" explains his behavior: Once we began practicing water blinds with points, sometimes requiring Laddie to swim past the point without touching it (confirming his earlier learning), and sometimes requiring him to get onto the point so that he can then be handled off it (into the open, by the way, but that's a different topic), he began vocalizing on casts near points. In fact, he would sometimes vocalize even before any handling, just because he saw a point in front of him and realized that he could not predict in advance how to avoid being handled, which apparently is his preferred way to run.

The question being addressed in this article is not how to train a dog to handle, which is an earlier question. The question being addressed here is how to address the kind of frustration Laddie is facing, though perhaps earlier training decisions could have avoided the problem in the first place.

Though I'm still working on the vocalizing problem, I've tentatively concluded that the way to help a dog gain a clear understanding of the Rule for Points is as follows:

1. For any mark, the dog should prefer water.  If the dog veers toward a point, handle her off it.  If she does not accept the handle in time and gets out of the water, call her back, either all the way or at least well in front of the point, and send her on the correct line.  For a dog with confidence issues about points, don't run marks that require the dog to get on a point.  If a group sets up such a mark, run a modified version or don't run the mark.
2. Set up blinds according to the dog's current confidence level of staying off points on marks.  If the dog is still learning that skill, and sometimes still veers to the point, do not run blinds across points.  But once the dog has a good understanding to prefer water, and has not attempted to veer onto a point when running a mark for some time, begin to mix in blinds that require handling over a point, gradually building to 50% requiring the dog to accept handling onto the point, and 50% requiring the dog to accept handling off the point.  If the dog's marks begin to deteriorate, and the dog begins veering toward points on marks, back off again and run no marks or blinds across points until that stops happening.
3. Do not encourage the dog to take a wide berth around the point, on marks or blinds.  For a mark, the dog might have difficulty judging the trajectory to get back on line, reducing the quality of the mark or even getting lost completely.  For a blind, the judge might consider that as not challenging the line, especially if a keyhole is formed between the point and some nearby object in the water, and the dog is expected to stay in the water and swim thru the keyhole.  Unfortunately, trying to help Laddie learn that veering too wide off a point could lead to handling just as surely as trying to get onto the point, seemed to add to his frustration about how to negotiate points without being handled, adding more complexity to the problem of his vocalizing.
4. For the dog that vocalizes when faced with a point, when you begin to run water blinds in a training session, start with one or more blinds that do not feature a point, so that the dog can gain success running non-vocal blinds.

As an additional guideline for trying to eliminate vocalizing on blinds, you might suspend running cold blinds for those configurations that make the dog uncomfortable for a time.  Instead, use a clearly visible lining pole and/or bucket, so that the dog can see the destination from the start line and visualize an appropriate line, sometimes across a point and sometimes bypassing the point, before even being sent.  This may not instantly end the vocalizing — it didn't for Laddie — but hopefully it will enable the dog to gradually gain confidence in understanding the rules.

Finally, as long as the dog displays any evidence of confusion or frustration, be 100% consistent in your setups so that dog can learn the Rule for Points without ambiguity: Never run a mark where the line is across a point.