My dog Chase has been at the trainer for two weeks now. In the two weeks he's been there he is on the birds, pointing, beeing shot over and fetching them up.

The only question I have is the trainer wants us to keep him on grouse and quail and shoot over him for a good season before we start whoa training. His reasoning is we want to keep his drive and excitment up. Honestly I have never seen a more prey driven, excited dog. He is an excellent trainer and has a great raport with the dogs, I just dont understand the reasoning behind not whoa training now and wanting to do "formal" training after the season is over. Maybe you guys can give me some advice. Should I work on this myself or wait until the end of the season?

Thanks in advance, Andrea

Thank you Trey. He is two this month. It makes sense the way you explained it. He does want Chase to be hunting right now so the formal training when season is over does sound like a good idea. I have worked with him on whoa at home. He can be running full out and if I call whoa he will stop dead in his tracks and not move until he is released, it has just never been tried on live birds, only while we are playing fetch. Thanks again, Andrea

He comes home on Saturday. He lost a considerable amount of weight in just two weeks. He is a VERY high energy dog and is hard to keep weight on. The trainer is concerned about his health if we leave him longer and wants us to continue his training at home. We are members of a local bird club so he will go out on the weekends to hunt. I was unsure weather we should put the effort into whoa training ourselves, but now I think we will just wait . I dont want to risk setting him back in his training. We recently had to rehome our seasoned hunter due to fence jumping. It would've been nice to have her hunt with him. Thank you for the input. I am new to all this hunting stuff and it gets a bit confusing to me. Have a great day, Andrea