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>>>>A dog has to learn how to hunt all by itself. The
cooperative dog also
has to learn how you hunt so that it can accommodate
its search pattern
to your hunting pattern. Dogs are pack hunting
animals so they learn
group hunting fairly quickly but they still have to
learn as much about
you as they have to learn about the game you seek.
When the dog has
learned how to work with you it sometimes seems that the
dog is reading
your mind. Cj>>>>
What I have to say now are no news for those who
are old on this list. It must have been around 1995 - 96 or something when late
Springer and Foxy started to work as "PH", professional hunters  )) at
commercial pheasant- and partridge shoots. As a rule so many birds are shot
during the day so in order to avoid to ruin the steadiness to shot and fall, of
the pointing dogs and spaniels, and in order to keep the guns going and having
action all the time, retrievers are used to pick up most of the shot birds,
unless they cant be picked up by hand. However difficult gliders and runners are
produced now and then and the retrievers had often great problems with them.
In those cases the pointing dogs and
spaniels, that knew the entire sequence of the shoot (while the
retrievers only knew the final tidying up operation), often found and caught the
runner much more efficiently when the retrievers had failed. The retrievers
where much better in taking direction from the handler but most often the glider
or runner was not where the handler thought it was and the retriever was
very dependent of the remote control the handler in this case was unable to
give. The retrievers had not been trained to work independently, or perhaps more
correctly; not been permitted to do so. They had been turned in to brainless
marionettes!
The reason is that many of those people who run
retrievers do not hunt. They may often have so called dual-purpose dogs,
instead of the more lively and intelligent working type. They train their dogs
for trials, and taking direction from the handler is very important in a trial.
When their dogs have received a couple of field trial merits they will go to
commercial shoots to pick up. If they are lucky they can start at big
shoots and kind of "drown" into a great mass of retrievers they have there, and
without causing any delay to the party due to inability, re-learn that real
hunting is a bit different from field trials and training.
When they start at small shoots, like
the partridge shoot where Maud handled Briz today, and another one
earlier this autumn, they are helpless. In Maud's party Briz and a pointer had
to do all the difficult fetch work. The two retrievers did not know how to make
an independent search but kind of got paralysed when the handler could not give
them a clue. The handlers did not understand that wounded partridge do not
behave like thrown dummies.
In order to create a really good retriever it
seems like you have to do some shooting of your own and most likely let your dog
do some searching and flushing by its own. The alternative is for ex. to
join a small rough shooting party where the dog can be in the centre of the
happenings and see everything that happens and feel the excited atmosphere of
the guns and other dogs. That way it will connect the search, flush, shot and
fall into the context of the final fetch and be alert and vigilant later in
life when they only have to fetch, whether at big shoots or under a
pigeon roosting tree. That would be just as important as training remote control
with the dog and it would give the handler an aha-experience.
Torsti
Borta Med Vindens Kennel "Ask not what your dog can do for you. Ask
what you can do for your dog." www.rospigan.net |