Building motivation in a retriever

[The material in this post was extracted and edited from a reply I sent during a private email conversation.]

. . . As far as your dog's inconsistent motivation goes, I haven’t had a dog quite like that, so I'll be writing from my own experience, but not with any strategy proven for a dog like yours.

To start, I might mention that my primary focus above all other training objectives when Laddie was a puppy, and to some extent to this day, is building motivation. We play a lot of tug, we play a lot of fetch with various toys inside and outdoors, and I would never, for example, do anything that he might perceive as punishment for picking up a bird, even if I would have liked to discourage something happening at the same time, such as slipping a whistle. As an example, when I decided to try to fix Laddie’s vocalizing on water casts (which he’s done since he was a puppy), I saw almost immediately that if he took a cast while vocalizing and I stopped him in an attempt to discourage the vocalizing, it also discouraged his taking the cast. Needless to say, I dropped that “training” strategy the instant I saw that happening.

Thus you can see that if I were to try to work with a dog who had motivational issues, I’d probably pretty much stop normal field work for awhile and work on finding games that he loved, and I’d play those games with him for weeks or even months. Fetch with objects he particularly likes (including clipwing pigeons if you have them available), chase games where you run away as he’s coming back to you, “find it”, tug, water retrieves — those are the kinds of things I’d try since those are things my dogs love. I’d avoid all physical discomfort at least at first, for example hot days or cold water. In Lumi’s case, I’d avoid stick ponds, because although she’s crazy about swimming, she’s somewhat scared of stick ponds.

One more point. How long you train your dog per session could be a major factor in his motivation. A cardinal rule of positive trainers is always to stop while the dog is at peak motivation and wanting more, so that that’s how he spends his idle time before the next session, wanting more. For a young puppy, this means just a single retrieve per session. I have a friend who trains Schutzhund and she uses what she calls “commercial training”: She puts the young dog alone in a room while she’s watching TV, and when a commercial comes on, she runs in to train the dog for a short time, making sure that she’s back in her chair by the time the commercial ends. She told me that approach builds motivation rapidly.

Overall, my idea for a dog like yours would be to build a huge, unalloyed positive reinforcement history for active games, and I’d be looking for a gradual ending of his tendency to go into “I don’t want to.” If a few weeks passed and he was still exhibiting avoidance behaviors for activities I thought he loved, I guess I’d probably think about retiring him from competition. But if I found that, by playing only games that he loved, and by becoming skillful at stopping before he started to lose motivation, he gradually stopped bringing out his “I don’t want to” behavior, then I would feel some hope and my next step would be to begin shaping the games we were playing so that, while they remained highly motivating, they also began to introduce the skills I wanted him to learn for competition. All of my training with such a dog would be based on maintaining and building motivation. But again, I think that’s largely true of how I trained Lumi and even more so (because I was more experienced), Laddie.