Postponing the Trained Retrieve Until After Teething

It's not unusual for traditional retriever trainers to delay Force Fetch, in which the dog learns the formal retrieval skills of "Out" (or "Give"), "Hold", and "Fetch", until after the dog has finished teething, around the age of six months.

Alice Woodyard uses the term "Trained Retrieve" to describe those training objectives, whether taught with a Force Fetch or in some other way.

Though my reasons may be somewhat different from the traditional ones, I'm inclined to think that 2Q puppies, like 4Q puppies, should also wait until after teething to begin work on a Trained Retrieve, allowing the puppy simply to drop a retrieved article when she loses interest in it, rather than deliver it to hand during those first six months.

One reason for waiting until after teething is that if the Trained Retrieve, which is the training that enables delivery-to-hand, is carried out when the dog finds it physically uncomfortable to carry a bumper or bird because of teething, that creates an unpleasant association with retrieving and a further unpleasant association with the specific articles that the dog encounters during that period.  That association is and will be countered by highly positive associations, but it nonetheless detracts from the reinforcement history that will largely determine your dog's behavior, and we'd like to avoid any such detraction if possible.  Those unpleasant associations, if they develop, may always remain as a silent influence in your dog's behavior.  In behavioral science, the saying is "You can never unring the bell."

Another reason for waiting is explained in Postponing Delivery-to-hand.

The months before teething can be exciting ones in a retriever puppy's development.  They include socializing the puppy during critical socialization windows that will never occur again, the puppy learning to learn thru early training like charging the clicker and "Sit", and introducing the puppy to field work, including gunner-thrown marks, water retrieves, and exposure to birds.  It's not as though the puppy has nothing else to do during those first six months.

In summary, it seems unnecessary, and potentially counterproductive, to require the puppy also to learn the Trained Retrieve during that period.

The Hold Game

The Hold Game is designed for a retriever with the following training issue:

• The dog has a tendency to go out, pick up the retrieval article (a bumper or a duck), return with it to a point reasonably close to the handler, and then drop it rather than delivering it to the handler's hand.

Beyond that, the Hold Game is only suitable for a dog who also has the following traits:

• The dog will readily engage in an enthusiastic game of tug with a bumper on a rope.
• The dog has a 100% reliable release of the bumper that can be non-aversively cued when you end the game of tug.  You might have trained a verbal cue such as "Out", "Give", "Leave it", or "Release", or the dog might simply let go from silent communication the two of you have developed, such as when you stop pulling, or when you grasp the body of the bumper with your other hand.

If you have a dog who has all of those traits, here's a simple game I call the Hold Game, that can be played indoors or out, and that can greatly strengthen the dog's "Hold" response in a way that will transfer to competition retrieves:

1. Toss a bumper, one that has a rope attached, for the dog.  You can play this game while requiring the dog to sit until sent, or with allowing the dog to break as soon as she sees you're about to throw.  Obviously I'm not suggesting that you destroy her steadiness, so if you are not comfortable having her break without being sent, don't permit that.  On the other hand, if you routinely throw hey-hey bumpers for your dog anyway, you can address steadiness at another time and focus on training "Hold" at this time.
2. As the dog comes back toward you with the bumper, move away from her if necessary in order to engage her inclination to chase you.
3. As soon as she's close enough, enthusiastically cue "Hold", and at that instant grab the rope and start pulling, just as when starting a game of tug.  As you play the Hold Game over time, try to swoop down rapidly with your hand in order to make the first pull especially sudden and especially hard, making every effort to take the bumper away with your first movement.
4. Play a joyous game tug for a few more moments.  You can even cue "Hold" again just as you pull back sometimes.  I know that some people believe that the game of tug is more valuable to a dog if the dog "wins", but I disagree.  It's the cooperative effort of pulling against one another that, in my opinion, the dog finds exciting, perhaps modeling a pack of dogs tearing apart a poor prey animal.
5. After a few seconds, end the game of tug by cueing a release, and as soon as the dog releases, immediately go back to step 1, throwing again.
6. Repeat a few times, but of course only while the dog is showing peak motivation for the game.  Try to stop well before her interest begins to flag.  Depending on the dog, a single rep may be the dog's limit and will strengthen "Hold", though giving the dog another rep immediately after a release also adds reinforcement history for the release.

As you can see, what's happening in this game is that the dog is learning at the visceral level to respond to the cue "Hold" with an intense tightening of her grip, lest she lose her precious tug toy.  The more skillfully you give a sudden, hard tug a split second after cueing "Hold", the better she learns the desired response.  Her clamping down is being highly reinforced by a quick session of one of her favorite games, and every time she hears "Hold", she must again tighten her grip to continue the fun.

Later, when she's returning with a bird at training day or an event, and just has those last several feet of land she must cross to deliver the bird, you can cue "Hold" to trigger that conditioning and give her an edge in holding onto the bird long enough to complete the delivery.

By the way, "Hold" aside, a secondary benefit of the Hold Game is that it adds reinforcement history to the return phase of the retrieve, providing powerful reinforcement simply for bringing the article close enough to the handler to make it possible for the Hold Game to begin.  Since developing a high quality return can be immensely challenging for the 2Q trainer, the Hold Game is a welcome contribution to the process.

When you begin using the Hold Game, the dog may not understand the game at first, and may not bring the bumper close enough for you to grab, or may let go when you try to start the game of tug.  Work with her to shape her understanding of the game's sequence of events, and soon the pleasure of the game will enable her to play it to full advantage.

Again, please do not use this game with a dog who does not have a 100% reliable, non-aversive release after a game of tug.  I fear that doing so might exasperate the tendency that a small percentage of dogs have for "sticking" or "freezing" on a bird, that is, coming to heel but refusing to release the bird, a problem that is difficult even for the pros to solve using non-aversive or aversive techniques, and that can end a dog's competitive career.  It's possible that the Hold Game played early in the dog's career could actually mitigate against such a problem developing, given the reinforcement forces at work, but I don't have enough experience to suggest that anyone take that risk.

Short Sessions

This is a small article, but it describes a key concept whose importance cannot be overstated:

Keep your sessions short so that you're always training at your dog's peak motivation.

For a young dog, you might let the dog have two or three retrieves, then take a break.

For an advanced dog, a schedule similar to those used by many of the pros might be a good guide: Training days separated by one or more rest days, each training day consisting of perhaps one land series and one water series, the series separated from one another by hours.  Such a schedule might not be convenient for the amateur, but it's an ideal to aim for.

Postponing Delivery-to-hand

I think that many retrievers are not crazy about giving up the article they've retrieved, and maybe it's true of other breeds as well.  The dog may bring the article back to show you, but I've found that they often don't want it taken away. In our household, the Goldens often greet family and guests at the front door with some object in their mouths, and it looks like they're offering a gift — totally cute — but if you reach for the article, the dog turns her head away.  They're showing you something, but they're also clearly communicating that they do not want to give it to you.

As a result, I think training delivery-to-hand in a young retriever can be counterproductive.  That is, I imagine that every time you take an article from a young dog, you may make her less likely to bring you the next article.  Traditional retriever trainers may not notice this effect much because the ecollar is such a powerful tool for strengthening recall that it masks and overcomes the difficulty.  But for positive trainers, who train without such tools, the reinforcement history that sets the probabilities for future behavior is more difficult to weight in favor of returning to the handler with the article, and taking the article from the dog adds weight to the wrong side of the scale.

Therefore, I'd be inclined to set aside the requirement for delivery-to-hand for the first several weeks or even months of the dog's early experience retrieving, without losing focus on strengthening the dog's reinforcement history for coming all the way back to you (see The Fetch Game).

To be clear, I'm not saying delivery-to-hand isn't an important skill.  Of course it is.  I'm just suggesting that a retriever's skills need to be layered on top of one another, and delivery-to-hand may be a later layer than coming back with the article.

Accordingly, if you're going to postpone delivery-to-hand, do not take the bumper when the dog gets close to you.  Just get control of the dog by catching the line she's wearing, and then lead her to the placement for her next retrieving opportunity.  She'll quickly lose interest in the article in her mouth, dropping it to the ground, and you can go ahead with the next rep.

Having your dog retrieve without delivering to hand gives you a chance to build great motivation for coming back to you with the article she retrieved, without having that motivation diminished by you taking the article away from her.

The Fetch Game

A fairly common phenomenon with retrievers is that their motivation level is higher going out on a retrieve versus coming back.  My feeling is that the reason many dogs go out well is because of the chase.  Retrievers just love the chase.

Accordingly, one way to strengthen the return, which worked quite well with my dogs, is to play what I call the Fetch Game, in which the chase occurs during the delivery rather than during the run out to the bird.

The Fetch Game works like this:

• Put the dog in a sit.
• Put an article to be retrieved (bumper or bird) right in front of the dog.
• Walk a short distance away.
• Call the dog, first with the cue "Fetch", and then, if the dog doesn't know what that means yet, immediately afterwards with "Here".
• Assuming the dog picks up the article and starts toward you, go racing away, making yourself as much like prey as you can.  You might shout "Yipes!", you might zigzag, you might run behind a tree or other hiding place, you might fall to the ground, you might do all of those.
• When the dog catches you, don't take the article (see Postponing Delivery-to-hand), though if you're using bumpers, a game of tug would be OK if the dog happens to like tug.  The main reinforcer for the return was the chase.  When the dog is back with you, have her sit, if necessary use another article so that she doesn't need to give up the one she had, and play the game again.
• Fade "Here" when the dog begins responding to "Fetch".
• Proofing of this game involves putting the article further and further out of the dog's way, in a clock face around the dog, until eventually the dog will turn all the way around, grab the article behind her, and then come racing after you.
• I'm not sure the game has much benefit at longer distances.  The goal is to develop a strong reinforcement history for the "Fetch" cue, and I think that works best at shorter distances.
• Note: Don't race away until the dog has picked up the article and started toward you, since that wouldn't be reinforcing the behavior of picking up the article and coming, it would just be luring the dog.

You can also use this game with a real retrieve.  That is, once the dog has gone out to a thrown article, picked it up, and started toward you, race away as described above.  I've also found that to be effective for strengthening the return.

However, playing the Fetch Game, where the article is not thrown, makes the chase all about coming toward you, so it may be a more effective way of strengthening that behavior than limiting your reinforcement for the return to situations when you're also strengthening the chase out to the bird.

The payoff for training with the Fetch Game comes at some training day or competition, when you see your dog standing over a bird and, after giving her a few moments, decide a prompt is in order and call out "Fetch", in the same intonation you've used for the Fetch Game.  In an instant, the dog perks up her ears, grabs the bumper, and charges toward you with all the enthusiasm of the chase you've conditioned into her for this moment.

Popping

With respect to competition retrievers, the term pop means that the dog looks at the handler while working in the field when the handler has not blown a whistle.  The dog could stop, turn, and look at the handler while running out to the area of the fall, or the dog might stop and look at the handler during a hunt.

The rules on popping vary with the competition venue, the level of the stake, and the type of retrieve.  Beyond that, judges interpret the rules on popping with some latitude.  For advanced competition, I wouldn't feel comfortable ignoring the problem, because some judges of advanced events consider any incident of popping a disqualification, even though that's not in the rules.

Almost everything I've learned about the popping comes from training Laddie to run in field trials. In this article, I'll attempt to relate what I've learned.

[Note: Dogs also sometimes look over their shoulder while running out without stopping.  I believe that's called a "peek".  I've rarely seen it from any dog, I know almost nothing about it, and I'm not attempting to directly address that topic here.  In addition, though I've heard that pops during a hunt are fairly common, Laddie has rarely if ever looked at me while hunting, so I don't know whether the term "pop" would apply if the dog looks without sitting during a hunt, or that, too, would be called a "peek".  Virtually all of my experience is with Laddie popping while running out toward the fall, and in Laddie's case, a pop looks identical to a whistle sit.  That's the problem I've been concerned with attempting to repair.]

Laddie Popping

Laddie began running in field trials (Qualifying stakes) when he was three, and since then, I've gradually realized that he pops occasionally.  I don't know whether he was doing it before or not, since it didn't prevent him from getting his Junior Hunter, Senior Hunter, or WCX titles, and if he had popped occasionally during that period of his development (and my development), I wasn't aware that it was an issue.

Laddie's popping in Quals in the last couple of years has also not completely locked him out of success, since he has received five JAMs, including two Reserve JAMs.  He popped on some of those, at least once on a water blind, and at least once on a water mark, and in both those incidents he ended up with an RJ.

On the other hand, he also was once not called back from a land triple where he popped, though I'm not certain that that alone was the reason, since on the mark where he popped, he was extremely confused and besides popping, also had a very long hunt, mostly far from the area of the fall.

I found the incident instructive on more than the subject of popping.  On that occasion, after Laddie had delivered the go-bird, he decided to line up for a retired mark that I thought from watching other dogs was quite difficult, so I tried to line him up on the other memory bird instead.  I thought he had locked in where I wanted him, with his spine correctly aligned, but when I sent him, he began acting confused immediately, and had a long, meandering hunt punctuated with a pop at midfield.  After finally coming back with the bird I had selected for him, he then nailed the supposedly difficult retired mark.  I regretted not letting him get the mark he'd apparently been planning on as he returned with the go-bird, and since then, I've switched to an approach, both in practice and in competition, of letting Laddie select his next mark if he wants to.

That incident leads to the first of my theories of why a dog sometimes pops; as you'll see, I have several other theories as well:

Possible Reasons for Popping

• Loss of confidence: The dog is turning to the handler for help.
• Overwork: The dog is physically comfortable, for example, some combination of tired, thirsty, or in pain from an injury.  In this case, the pop may actually be a kind of quitting: "I'm not having fun, can I come back in?"  Though I don't think this is the primary reason for Laddie's occasional pops, it did seem to be a reasonable explanation one hot day when Laddie popped late in the session, and I've seen both Lumi and Laddie head for water or a shady spot rather than completing a retrieve when they were younger.
• Mental discomfort: The dog finds herself in a situation that she associates with having been corrected in the past.  This is similar to anticipatory response (see below), but in this case the dog pops as an avoidance response from having been corrected for incorrect behavior, rather than as an anticipatory response merely from being handled.  I understand that avoidance may be a statistically significant reason for popping in traditionally trained dogs.  I don't know whether this would happen in a positive trained dog like Laddie, but I also don't feel I have enough data to distinguish it as an explanation from anticipatory response.  Perhaps even positive training methods like the Walk Out for a slipped whistle could result in more popping on later retrieves, rather than merely the fact that the dog has been handled in particular situations.  To the extent that at least some dogs would prefer not to hear the whistle blown during a retrieve, perhaps the act of handling even when the dog responds correctly to the whistle can lead to development of popping as an avoidance behavior.
• Mistaking environmental sound for a whistle: The dog thinks she heard a whistle even though the handler didn't blow his whistle.  I think I've seen this when Red-winged Blackbirds and possibly other species of birds or possibly frogs were active at a pond where Laddie was running a big water retrieve, and possibly also when the sound of a whistle carried from another dog being trained somewhere else on the property.  I even think the sound of wind or water might be confused for a whistle.  I think such a mistake is most likely on long retrieves, especially in water, where recognizing a true whistle might involve a bit of guesswork by the dog.
• Anticipatory response: The dog has reached a situation that she associates with situations on blinds where she is often stopped with a whistle, and even though no whistle was blown, and even though this might be a mark rather than a blind, she responds by reflex as though the whistle had been blown.  Anticipatory response is sometimes useful in dog training.  For example, if you repeatedly use a new cue, and immediately follow it with an old cue the dog already knows, and then provide a high value reinforcer for the correct response, soon the dog will begin to respond to the new cue even before you use the old cue, and you can stop using the old cue.  However, anticipatory response is also the bane of many competitive athletes, causing a golfer or tennis player to look up before making contact with the ball and thereby having a mis-hit, causing a racer to break before the starter pistol fires, and so forth.  Popping in some cases seems to be an example of the same mechanism working against the dog trainer.  For example, on land blinds, if you tend to blow the whistle just as the dog is about to clear a crest and go out of sight, so that you can fine tune her direction before she disappears, you might inadvertently develop in the dog an anticipatory response that results in popping just as she's about to clear a crest even on a mark.  This kind of popping is not an avoidance response (see "mental discomfort" above).  To the contrary, it occurs because responding correctly to the whistle has been positively reinforced with a cast to the bird.  Specific reasons why popping as an anticipatory response might develop:
• Practicing blinds: It would be great if a dog always had a clear understanding of whether she's running a mark or a blind, because we desire the competition retriever to have a different state of mind for these two kinds of retrieves.  When she's running a mark, we want her to run to the area of the fall and then hunt up the bird, and do not want her to look to the handler for assistance.  By contrast, when she's running a blind, we don't want her to exercise that same independence, but rather want her to be completely under the handler's control.  It's easy to imagine that if the dog spends a significant amount of her training time running blinds, and therefore a significant amount of her training time learning to cede control to the handler, a risk exists that she might revert to that state of mind occasionally when running a mark.
• Handling on marks: When sent for a mark and the dog does not nail it (run straight to it), the handler has several alternatives: He can let the dog hunt; he can call for help (or prearrange with the throwers to help under particular circumstances); or he can blow the whistle and then handle the dog to the mark.  I think it's fair to say that each of these has advantages and disadvantages, and I won't try address all of them in detail here.  However, I will mention that some trainers much prefer handling to calling for help, and for their dogs, the experience of being handled on a mark becomes increasingly likely, which might make anticipatory response mentioned above increasingly likely even if the dog is aware that she is running a mark rather than a blind.  A subset of this case would be trainers who, like me, train without benefit of throwers a large percentage of the time during some phase of the dog's development, so that handling on marks is the only alternative to letting the dog hunt.  I think this is a major reason why training alone is a far less than an ideal way to prepare a dog for competition. By the same token, since I have been unable to find a field trial training group who will let Laddie and me train with them, and my family members are rarely willing to come out and train with us, gradually coming to realize that Laddie was being handled on marks too often was one of the reasons I decided to start hiring neighborhood kids to come out and throw for us, despite the high expense.

Don't

From what I understand, traditional trainers do not have any easy solutions for a dog that pops.  Here are some suggestions of approaches that I've heard are not recommended:

• Do not cast the dog when she turns to look at you.  If the reason she popped was that she was feeling a bit insecure, and you respond by casting her and relieving that feeling of uncertainty, the risk is that that your response will reinforce her behavior in that situation and her popping may increase.
• Similarly, do not call her back to heel.  Again, if the reason she popped was that she wanted more help, calling her back may cause the response to increase.  (But see COUNTERINTUITIVE SOLUTIONS below.)
• Do not correct the dog for popping.  For a traditional trainer, this would mean that you would not, for example, want to use an ecollar to discourage popping.  For myself and other positive trainers, it would mean, for example, not to use a Walk Out for popping.  The reason that this is on the DON'T list is that the trainer has no way of communicating clearly to the dog the reason for the correction, and if the dog associates the correction with some other, desirable, behavior, the effect may be counterproductive.  For example, if the dog thinks she's being corrected for turning in a new direction during her outrun, she may begin to line out on retrieves to avoid the correction, rather than turning to hunt the area of the fall when she's off line.  I've also heard that the dog might begin to no-go if she perceives, from the start line, that this setup carries the risk of her receiving a correction after she launches.

Solutions

With an understanding of why dogs pop, and a recognition of the pitfalls inherent in some of the methods that might suggest themselves for solving the problem, other solutions seem safe and useful:

BUILD CONFIDENCE

If, for example, you have a dog who never pops on a 100y mark, but often pops on a 300y mark, it may be that the dog spent adequate deal of time building confidence on 100y marks, but was moved to much longer marks too quickly.  Having the dog run shorter marks again for several sessions, and then only gradually introducing somewhat longer marks into the mix, may enable you to eventually build back up to long marks without the popping problem coming back.

As obvious as this solution is, I'd like to caution that it's not necessarily going to work.  The difference between a short, easy mark and a long, difficult mark is not necessarily just one of degree.  I believe that it's possible that a dog might unavoidably experience new emotions on long, difficult mark, no matter how gradually such marks are introduced, that she never experienced earlier in her training.

GET HELP FROM THE THROWERS

Another possible way to build confidence is for the gunners to help with a "hey-hey" when the dog pops, or even better, just before the dog pops.  As handler, you might call for help on the radio at the right moment, or you might pre-arrange for one or more of the gunners to call "hey-hey" under particular situations, such as when they see that the dog is about to pop or when the dog reaches a particular location such as the top of a crest after launching.  On several occasions, I've trained with experienced trainers working gun stations who called "hey-hey" when Laddie popped even though I didn't request the help, just as they would in other situations where they were confident the handler would want the gunner to help.

AVOID OVERWORK

It might seem beneficial for a dog's conditioning to run her on occasion beyond the point where she's at maximum comfort level, but exercise great caution.  Some of the risks:

• She's more likely to get injured.  An extreme example would be heat stroke.
• It could reduce her motivation for training or for retrieving in general.
• She could develop an adverse association with a particular context, such as the skill or setup configuration you happen to be working on that day.
• Finally, as mentioned above, it could result in popping.  Because popping in that situation gives her some relief from her discomfort, and is therefore reinforcing of the popping motor pattern, later, she might begin to pop at times even when she's not tired or thirsty.

DON'T RUN A DOG WITH A HEALTH ISSUE

Obvious as this may sound to the reader, it was not obvious to me on at least one occasion.  What happened was that Laddie once got his tail caught in the side door of our van during a long, overnight drive home after an event.  By the next day, he showed no significant effects, though he wasn't carrying his tail curled over his back as he normally did.  The next time we trained, Laddie popped repeatedly on both water and land retrieves, much earlier on the outrun than I'd ever seen him pop before.  Because I didn't know that popping could be a symptom of an injury, I was mystified.

Eventually, Laddie went thru a series of x-rays, a period of no training at all, and a longer period of training only on land but not on water.  But given the accident Laddie's tail had suffered, I should have realized the first time he popped in that unprecedented way that something was wrong, terminated the session immediately, and discontinued training entirely until Laddie had clearance from a trusted vet with knowledge of performance dogs.

TRAIN WITH A GROUP

It's fine to accomplish some training objectives, such as obedience and handling skills, training alone.  In addition, I think you can get some benefit out of training with remote launchers and stickmen.  However, if you have aspirations of success in advanced competition, you simply must train with a group as often as possible to prepare the dog for the scents, sights, and sounds of an event.

An additional benefit is that you may learn a great deal from some of the more experienced trainers, though the other side of that coin is also having to deal with much unsolicited and unhelpful advice.  The benefits aren't only from direct advice.  They also come from such experiences as seeing setups that you might never have thought of, watching how the other dogs are trained, and seeing the experienced trainers accounting for factors such as a little wind that you weren't aware mattered.

With respect to popping, training with a group means you'll be able to call for help when the dog gets lost on a mark, rather than having to watch a long, unproductive hunt or handle to give the dog help. Why that might help with popping is discussed in the next section.

BE AWARE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS

If you become aware that birds, frogs, the wind, nearby trainers, or other factors might be causing your dog to be uncertain whether she's hearing your whistle or some other sound — even if it's not confusing other dogs in the group — take appropriate steps, such as using a louder whistle or moving to a different location.

AVOID EXCESSIVE HANDLING ON MARKS

Some trainers seem to feel that any time one of their dogs needs to be interrupted from a hunt, the only acceptable way to do that is for the trainer to blow his whistle and handle the dog to the mark.  Indeed, that's a skill that any advanced dog needs, because sometimes that situation does come up in an event.  If the dog is not able to transition from a hunting state of mind, to a state of mind where the dog accepts control from the handler, then the dog will be marked down in the judging and may end up being disqualified.

What's more, certain training situations cannot be addressed successfully except by the use of handling on a mark.  An example is when the dog starts to run the bank on a water retrieve.  In many cases, the only way to prevent the dog from gaining success and reinforcement from running the bank is to handle the dog into the water.

However, many situations also occur when the ideal solution, at least in my opinion, is for the handler to explicitly not interact with the dog, but instead for the handler to call for help from the thrower.  Some trainers prearrange with their throwers to always help the dog in certain situations, such as if the dog gets behind the gun station, or if the dog heads for an old fall, or if the dog begins to hunt way short, or if the dog is clearly getting lost.  And whether you've prearranged help or not, sometimes as a trainer you feel that the dog would get more benefit from getting to the mark immediately than from more hunting.

An example of that is what I call Plan B.  Ideally (that is, Plan A), the dog remembers where the bird is and runs straight to it.  But if Plan A doesn't work on a particular mark, then a helpful Plan B is for the dog to catch sight of the gun station and use that information to navigate to the fall.  As I mentioned, some dogs never gets any help from the throwers, because the trainer always handles in that situation rather than calling for or prearranging help.  Such a dog may not realize that seeing the gun station might help her find the bird.  But a dog who does get such help in training, gradually learns Plan B and can put it to use in an event.

With respect to popping, the less frequently you handle on a mark, the less likely the dog is to learn an anticipatory response for particular contexts, such as having to engage herself in a hunt, that might result in a pop.

AVOID CONFUSING MARKS WITH BLINDS

The goal with this suggestion is to make it so that, when the dog is running a mark, she is unlikely to be reminded of similar situations when she responded to a whistle sit, responded correctly, and was rewarded with a cast to the bird.  Avoiding such associations may not help popping on blinds, if the dog is having that problem, but at least it may help make popping on marks less likely.

Here are some ideas to avoid having the dog confuse the experience of running a mark with the experience of running a blind:

• Run more marks and fewer blinds during the course of a week's training.
• Isolate the sessions where you run blinds from those where you run marks.  For example, run blinds only one day a week, and don't run marks that day.
• Even if you run marks and blinds on the same day, don't run them in the same series, despite the fact that that often occurs in competition.  After the popping problem seems to be solved, perhaps you can go back to occasionally running marks and blinds in the same series, for example to give the dog practice with poison birds (that is, a mark is thrown but the dog is then run on a blind before being sent to pick up the mark).
• Avoid letting blind setups look like marks.  For example, don't have throwers or stickmen in the field when running blinds.  Taking the dog out alone on days you're running blinds, with no assistants present, goes even further in that direction.

Counterintuitive Solutions

The importance of this topic, and information I've included above, were my primary reasons for writing this post.  Although it appears that I've made significant progress in improving Laddie's popping, both on water and on land, I am not at all certain that the methods I've used worked for the reasons I thought they did, or that any of my experience would be repeatable with another dog or another handler.

Nonetheless, for completeness, I'll mention some additional steps I've taken to address Laddie's popping:

CALLING THE DOG IN

First, for popping on big water retrieves, after trying everything else I could think of including all of the above suggestions, one day I decided to try calling Laddie back and resending him, even though that is on my DON'T list as shown above.  I did this repeatedly in a single session, and each time I resent Laddie, he swam further, until, after about five tries, at last he completed the retrieve without popping.  He has not popped on a big water mark in more than a year since.  However, it's possible that this may have increased his tendency to vocalize in water.  I don't know that's the case, but I think it's possible.

I also think it's possible that calling a dog to heel after popping might result in an increase in popping for some dogs, but a decrease for others:

• It might result in an increase for the dog who is popping out of insecurity, since it would solve the dog's problem and give the dog reason to turn to that solution again in the future.  That's why this approach was listed as a DON'T.
• On the other hand, it might result in a decrease in popping, if the dog viewed being called back as disadvantageous to her desires.  On the day I used this approach with apparent success, Laddie, who presumably would prefer to complete the retrieve rather than having to swim all the way back to the start line before getting another try, had good reason not to behave in a way that would require him to come back without the bird.

However, even if calling the dog to heel does result in a decrease in popping because the dog sees being called back as a correction, correcting the dog could also have an unintended and undesired side-effect, so in a sense, the approach I used with Laddie actually may appear twice on my DON'T list.  I gave the example of an undesirable side-effect above as the dog continuing straight rather than turning to hunt when reaching the area of the fall.  I've also heard that some dogs begin to no-go in situations they recognize at the line as reminding them of experiences where they previously had unpleasant experiences.  Also, as I mentioned above, this approach may have increased Laddie's tendency to vocalize on water retrieves.

You can see why I'm reluctant to give my "solution" to Laddie's popping on big water retrieves as a recommendation.  Yet it does seem to have helped Laddie, when I found no other solution to the problem, so I felt it should be included in this article.

OVERTRAINING

Calling Laddie in on big water retrieves seemed to cancel out his tendency to pop in that context.  Yet in later months, Laddie was still occasionally popping on land retrieves, and it actually appeared to me that the pops were becoming more frequent.  I tried to figure out what the triggers were for a pop, and came up with some hypotheses, such as:

• Perhaps he's most likely to pop on an uphill incline, especially as he approaches the crest, since that's a situation where I'm reasonably likely to blow a whistle when Laddie's running a blind.
• Perhaps he's most likely to pop on long, difficult marks, especially with a retired gun, since that's a situation where he might start to feel insecure.
• Perhaps he's most likely to pop when he's tired, thirsty, or both, since that's a situation where he might feel like quitting rather than continuing to work.

Initially, I thought I might be able to address Laddie's popping problem by avoiding all the triggers I could perceive, giving him several confidence-building sessions where hopefully no pop would occur.  The idea was that I would then gradually add those triggers back in, and the storehouse of confidence would enable him to continue to avoid popping.

However, I couldn't find a way to do it.  At that time, no matter how easy I tried to make the setups, we couldn't get thru more than a session or two without at least one pop.  I was beginning to get discouraged.

Then one day, I took a different perspective on it: "No matter how easy I make our practices," I thought, "isn't a day inevitably going to come when Laddie does feel insecure during a retrieve?  And if the only response he's ever learned to that feeling is to pop, isn't he going to pop on that occasion?  And what if that occasion happens to be in the middle of a competition?"

From that line of thought, it occurred to me that what I really needed to do was to train Laddie not to respond to a feeling of insecurity by popping.  Having not discussed my thoughts with anyone else, I decided on this plan: I'd use my assistants to intentionally set up difficult series, hopefully precipitating a pop, and then I'd call out, "No, DOWN," and when Laddie complied by lying down, I'd call out to the gun stations, "Pick it up, please."  Laddie has heard those words before because I used them repeatedly in a session some years ago when training him not to creep.  After the pop and Laddie was in a down, I would then go out to put on his lead and bring him back in.  We might then run the same setup again, or more likely, we'd just end that series and set up something completely different before giving him another chance to run.

I only tried the idea out once, and ended up not using a correction after all.  Working with a single assistant, we ran a session of four doubles.  For each double, the assistant threw a long, difficult mark, and then I threw a bumper to the side to give the assistant a chance to retire behind a camouflage umbrella, a nearby mound, or a tree.  On the third double, Laddie popped while running thru a large patch of high cover.  Though that's what I'd been planning on, I forgot how I had intended to respond and instead just called out, "Here."  Laddie immediately raced in.  I didn't know whether to be pleased or discouraged.  I liked the high quality response to his recall cue, but what about his perseverance, his motivation to retrieve?  Shouldn't he have at least hesitated, or shown some confusion or dismay with his body language, instead of running in so eager and carefree?

It happened that after that incident, I learned from an experienced trainer that correcting Laddie for popping, as I had planned, could result in some serious side-effects such as lining out or no-gos, so I abandoned the idea of correcting Laddie for popping.

But I didn't abandon the idea of overtraining as a possible solution.  At that time, Laddie had caught his tail in the power side door of my van and broken a bone in it.  So, after x-rays and waiting six weeks for the tail to heal, followed by a couple of lighter sessions to rebuild his conditioning after the break, I decided to go ahead and run him on some big, difficult series.  I set up a series of triples over several sessions where the memory birds were both long (300y+ and 200y+) and were both retired, continuing to train with as many factors as I could arrange, such as patches of high cover, confusing elevation changes such as hills, ditches, banks, and depressions, obstacles such as construction mounds and boulders, diagonal dirt roads, repeating backgrounds to make it difficult to find a target to run toward, and so forth.  Laddie had never run a triple with more than one retired gun before, as far as I could remember, and every one of those series was more difficult than any series we'd ever seen in competition, except that we couldn't use water to add to the difficulty as might happen in a trial.

I don't know what would happen if you suddenly raised the bar in that way on a lot of dogs at Laddie's level, what variations of responses you'd get.  But I'll tell you what happened with Laddie.  He stopped popping entirely, and he nailed a high proportion of the marks, even the longest ones.  Even when he didn't nail them, he generally went right out to the area of the fall and then quickly hunted up the bumpers.  I had the gunner help a few times in the early sessions when Laddie hunted outside the area of the fall, but soon, I couldn't even create set ups where help would be needed.  

Of course I was happy to see Laddie's strong marking on these difficult setups, but more important was that the popping had stopped.  Even when I tried running him on shorter and simpler setups,  including some identical to those where he had previously popped, he simply ran them and made them look easy, which I guess they were after his recent overtraining.

It is impossible to know whether running big triples with multiple retired guns really had anything to do with Laddie's sudden improvement in not popping.  After all, during the same period where I began trying this approach, all of the following other changes were also going on:

• For the first time, I began having Laddie ride in his crate whenever we went somewhere in the van, resting in his crate not only while we were at the training site but also riding in his crate for the whole trip.  Laddie has not ridden in the passenger compartment of the van in several weeks, though he had previously traveled that way all his life.  I don't see how this might relate to popping, but it is a change in his life during the same period and therefore, I think, deserves mention.
• Temperatures had been dropping.  It was still summer, but instead of temps in the 90s when Laddie was popping the most, we were later training in low 80s or even lower.
• Shorter sessions.  I began limiting our sessions to a maximum of two triples.  Previously, we sometimes ran more.
• No water work.  Because of the broken bone in Laddie's tail, he hadn't been swimming in six weeks.  Again, I don't know how that might relate to less popping on land, but perhaps it did somehow.
• Reduced and isolated running of blinds.  Per my theory that running blinds might increase likelihood of popping on marks by a process of association, I began only been running Laddie on blinds once or twice a week, and then only on days where we didn't run any marks.  When we began experimenting with overtraining as a solution to popping, Laddie hadn't run a blind and marks in the same session in weeks.

Having listed all those other conditions during that period, my instincts are nonetheless that for this dog, increasing the challenge actually did have an influence on making him less likely to pop.  I think it's pretty clear that with humans who are gifted in a particular way, motivation increases with certain challenges.  As a working hypothesis, Laddie found the new, higher level of work so interesting that he began forgetting to pop.  Or something like that.

Could it be true?  Well, I'd like to see a lot more experimentation with other dogs before declaring that such a hypothesis actually holds water.

Running Two-sided Dogs

Many trainers train some or all of their dogs to launch and deliver to either side of the handler.

If you're running a two-sided dog, then in a marking series, you have a choice of which side to use for having the dog watch the birds thrown, having the dog come to heel when delivering, and launching the dog from, both for the go-bird and for each of the memory-birds.

Although exceptions apply to any rule, and exceptions come up more often in advanced competition, a few guidelines work for many situations.  Again, these are guidelines, not hard and fast rules: 

• For a single, run the dog on the side the bird is being thrown to.
• For a multiple where one of the birds is particularly attracting to the dog, because it's relatively close and/or because it's a flyer, use choice of side strategically at the line, so that your body position can maximize the dog’s opportunity to see all the marks thrown and focus well on each fall.  In general, place the dog on the side of you that is opposite from the most attractive throwing station (usually, the closest bird or the flyer).  Here are some examples:
• For a double in which the go-bird is a flyer and/or closer than the memory bird, run the dog on the opposite side of the go-bird.  For example, if the go-bird is on the left, run the dog on your right side.  The reason for this is that if you run the dog from the flyer side, and the dog decides to watch that station when the other bird is about to be thrown first, you are outside the dog's peripheral vision and may not be able to give her the visual information about which bird is about to be thrown.  If the dog is on the opposite side of the flyer and locks onto the flyer station as you await the first throw, you can step forward facing the first bird, and the dog will see you moving and see which way you're facing.  After the first throw, you can step back and face the flyer, communicating clearly that it's time for the dog to turn her gaze in that direction.
• For a double in which the first bird down is the flyer and/or close enough to be pulling your dog's attention, and from experience you think it possible she will not turn to watch the go-bird, run the dog on the opposite side of the first bird.  That way, you can step forward within her line of sight and face the go-bird after the first bird has been thrown.  If she is on the same side as the first gun station, and locks onto the first bird down, she may not be able to see you when you turn, even if you step forward.
• For a triple thrown middle-outside-outside, where the second bird is particularly attractive to the dog (flyer and/or close), run the dog on the opposite side of the second bird.  After the first two birds are thrown, you can step up and turn to the third gun station and the dog will see your movement.  If she's on the same side as the second bird, she may not see you when you turn to the less attractive third bird.
• For a triple thrown middle-outside-outside, where the go-bird is particularly attractive to the dog (flyer and/or close), run the dog on the opposite side of the go-bird.  After the first mark in the middle is thrown, if your dog turns toward the go-bird, you can step forward and face the second bird and your dog will see you.  If she's on the same side as the go-bird, she may turn toward the go-bird after the first throw and not see you when you turn to the correct second bird.
• For a triple thrown round the horn, you would usually run the dog from the trailing side, especially if the go-bird is attractive to the dog (flyer and/or close), since she might turn from the first throw to the go-bird and never see the middle throw.  If she's on the trailing side, you can step forward and face the middle gun after the first throw, and the dog will see you.  If she's on the leading side, she may not see you.
• However, if the first bird of an around-the-horn triple were a nearby flyer, running the dog on the trailing side might be disastrous, since the dog might lock in on the flyer as soon as it goes down, not see you turn to the other gun stations, and not see one or even both of those throws.  If you were able to anticipate that risk, possibly by going to school on the teams that ran the triple before you, you'd run the dog on the opposite side of the flyer, so that you could step forward and face the second gun station after the flyer is down, and the dog would see your movement.
• On a multiple, after the dog returns with the go-bird, send the dog for each of the remaining marks on the side the bird is thrown toward, even though the dog may not have watched the throw from that side.  Take up your position and face the next throw as the dog is running back with the previous bird, so that the dog gets all possible communication about which way you plan to send her next.
• If the dog delivers the bird and then lines up with a clear intention of running to a different mark than the one you had planned, consider accepting her selection.  Different trainers have different ideas about this, and one combination I've run into is that in training, the trainer always requires the dog to run to the station selected by the handler, but in an event, the handler always accepts the dog's preference if the dog expresses one.  A different pair of options, which both follow the aphorism, "Train as you compete, compete as you train," is to always run the dog to the handler's selection, or to always allow the dog to choose (which after some trial and error happens to be my approach).  So if you have decided to allow the dog to choose, and it sometimes happens that the dog is not on the side of the throw as a result, then don't send her yet, but first get her on the side you want her on.  You can arrange for that by swinging her around to your other side, but that has the disadvantage of causing her to take her eye off the target, and also of slightly changing the perspective.  To avoid both those problems, you can leave the dog in place and step over her butt to get to the other side before settling her and sending her.
• If the dog seems unable to lock into the direction you want to send her, you might try swinging her to your other side to detach her from her previous lock and giving her a fresh perspective before locking her in, hopefully in the correct direction this time, and then sending her.
• By the way, although not the primary subject of this article, I would like to suggest that you never send the dog on a mark or a blind unless (a) she's visually locked in on the line you want, and (b) her body is also aligned on the line you want.  It is remarkable how often you see a dog launch in competition on the wrong line, but on the exact line that she was gazing at the moment she was sent, or that her spine was aligned on.

I might mention that many dogs do not need all these guidelines for many setups.   Often, you can let the dog watch the throws from either side, and you can send her for them from either side after a delivery in a multiple, and she'll be fine.  However, if a setup occurs in which one of the birds really is so attractive that some of the dogs before you in the running order are not seeing all of the other birds thrown, that's not the time you want to start figuring out how to handle the situation when it's your turn, hoping your dog will understand what your body language means.  If you've been communicating in a consistent way the dog's whole career, even when the dog didn't need the extra help, you're more likely to be in sync when difficult situations arise.