Training Tales - Practice, Practice, Practice - By Linda

Welcome to the first ever edition of Training Tales at Earl's World! Over a month ago, we gave you all the opportunity to email us with a small piece about your dog training experience with your dogs. You can find our initial Training Tales introduction on THIS POST if you scroll down to the end.

Today, Linda from the brilliant 2 Brown Dawgs Blog - a blog following the escapes of her two Chesapeake Bay Retrievers - will be guest posting with her Training Tales on our blog.

Practice, Practice, Practice - By Linda

Thunder, Storm and Freighter are Chesapeake Bay Retrievers. They are hunting dogs and when hunting season is over, they participate in AKC Retriever Hunt Tests. These tests stimulate hunting situations and test all of the skills that a trained hunting dog should possess, such as: being steady to shot, marking multiple falls of birds in a field or a pond or a combination of a field and a pond, retrieving birds to hand, following their handler's signals to a bird they did not see fall (called a 'blind retrieve'), and honouring another hunting dog by sitting patiently while the other dog is sent to retrieve.

Training for these types of tests takes a lot of patience and a lot of practice. Training for the higher level tests requires years of training. Dogs start out doing simple one bird retrieves, but as their training progresses, they will retrieve multiple birds in combination with multiple blind retrieves. Difficulty is often increased using the available terrain such as hills, water or crops.

Retriever hunt tests can be very challenging because there is no way to set up every single scenario that a dog may encounter at a test. Just when you think you may have exposed your dog to every type of set-up, an imaginative judge will set up a test scenario that you never thought of trying. Or the weather may not cooperate. Perhaps it is raining so hard the dog is not able to see the birds fall. Or perhaps the wind is pulling the dog off course to another bird while you are trying to direct it to a blind retrieve 150 yards away. There are so many things that can affect how well or how poorly a dog performs on test day.

When your dog does not perform as well as you hoped, it is very easy to become frustrated. Novice handlers can be particularly down trodden after an unsuccessful test, but the better way to look at it is that you and your dog need more practice. We received this piece of advice from a professional field trail trainer during a seminar we attended. He stressed that a failure at a test does not mean there is something wrong with your dog or your training. It just means that you have not practiced enough and you should go back and practice, practice, practice.

Linda from 2 Brown Dawgs Blog has given us permission to publish her photographs on our blog.

Thank you for writing in, Linda! We loved your article.

Have you been through an exciting and/or interesting time and can produce a short piece about a training journey you and your dog have been through? Have you experienced any learning curves and come out with an impressive result and success, or are you in the process of achieving your goals? Do you and your dog participate in competitions? What activity/sport do you participate in? Highs and lows happen; how have you coped in your situation? Your experience could really help other dog and owner combinations. Email us at borderterriersruleOK@gmail.com with your short piece and a couple of relevant photographs, putting 'Training Tales' as the subject of the email. We can't wait to hear your Training Tales! All Training Tales will be published on our blog, and an online badge will be available as a souvenir of your piece being published!

By emailing us your piece and photographs, you grant us permission to publish them on our blog, unless, if you specifically do not want your content published here, state this on your email and your content will not be published. It will be clearly stated on the post whom the piece and photographs belong to.

We are joining SlimDoggy, To Dog With Love and My GBGV Life in the FitDog Friday Blog Hop. Thank you!