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.