Training the Delivery

[From a post to PositiveGunDogs]

On May 13, 2013, at 4:10 PM, a list member wrote:

Alice wrote: Tolerate no slowness or reluctance to come to you with the "big prize" and no reluctance to deliver.

Can someone go over step by step how they get the speed in delivering with only a positive method? This is an area I have struggled with young dogs that want to "keep" the prize. I have used e collar methods in the past to overcome it, which worked great but would love a solidly trained positive approach to teaching this for my next retriever.

Hi. First of all, I hope I'm not disagreeing with Alice here, but I don't think young dogs should be trained to deliver to hand prior to teething (around six months). I believe that doing so discourages the dog from coming when called (the recall), which I think is the most difficult field training skill to train with positive methods. Before training the dog to deliver to hand, she should have months of just retrieving bumpers, dead birds, and flyers to the general area of the handler, then dropping the bird whenever she is ready to on her own. Typically, she drops the bird because she is being brought to the line to watch another throw and be sent for another retrieve, and the previously retrieved bird is no longer valuable to her.

Second, the intolerance Alice is speaking of, once it becomes appropriate to the dog's level of training, is based on what Alice calls the Trained Retrieve (TR), which is a more generic name for what traditional trainers call the Force Fetch (FF). That is, the FF is one kind of TR, but positive methods can train the same skills, which are Hold-Out-Fetch. I've seen a number of descriptions on training a positive TR, all based on back chaining. I like this video as one example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oFO9Z0oHBA

In other words, first you train the behavior Alice is describing, and then you proof it under the many conditions the dog will need to learn to deal with, such as when outside, when around strangers, when wet, etc. Intolerance is just another name for training and proofing.

Finally, since this is such a difficult behavior for a positive trained dog to learn, I'd expect it take a lot of time and a lot of effort. Here's an article I wrote that describes one aspect of the problem -- that chasing is more fun for a dog than fetching -- and a solution based on that analysis -- the Fetch Game, which I found to be a powerful follow-up to the TR:

http://2q-retriever.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-fetch-game.html

LL&L

PS

Here's another video that might prove useful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LYvJYDfrr0