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Patience, Grasshopper!
Rich Carpenter

Those who know me probably raise their eyebrows at this suggestion from me, since I’m not only not patient, but don’t even consider patience a virtue. Stubborn, yes. Patient, no. In retriever training, for us hunters to get the most out of our retrievers, especially in advanced training, I think, as hard as it can be for some of us, a patient and thoughtful approach is extremely important. So, too, is a well structured, step- wise program that we pick and put into practice.

From both my own experience learning to train retrievers, as well as over 25 years of watching other HRC club members learn to train their retrievers, it seems two things create the most grief. The first is control. Can I have an “Amen!” here? Yup, control. Without reliable sit, come and stay, you can never have much success at advanced work. The other frustration for many new trainers is teaching the young dog to run blind retrieves. Hopefully, as you are getting started, you have hooked up with some experienced trainers and gotten yourself the materials to learn and apply a full training program. If you follow that program properly and maintain your standards, you should develop and keep some decent control. That same program will also greatly increase the odds that you will be able to develop a dog that will ultimately be running satisfactory and stylish blinds.

I think you can argue that teaching control is much simpler than teaching a dog to run good cold blinds, at least in understanding how you should achieve what you are after. Being consistent and keeping that control and basic obedience can be a horse of a different color, and I’d plead guilty to being someone who sometimes shorts obedience work and finds other aspects of training more interesting. I think from back in the day when my first HRCH retriever, Amos Moses, was terrorizing the line in HRC tests and training in my first attempt to train a Finished dog, deep down I knew what should have been done to prevent the control problems. Knowing what I needed to have done for him to have been a decent blind-running dog was pretty much a total mystery to me. Even with the much better training materials available today, I still see inexperienced trainers and handlers struggle with understanding the process and dynamics of teaching and handling young dogs on blinds. We’ll leave control to a different day and probably a more competent teacher, and talk about some of the things that both may make life more pleasant for you and your four-legged charge, and also result in blinds you feel good about watch- ing and that your dog feels good about running.

This is not intended to be an instructional program for teaching a young dog to run cold blinds. That comes from your chosen structured training program. Rather, I just want to throw out some thoughts, ideas and suggestions that may make your first venture into teaching blinds a little easier. Since there is not unlimited time or space in training materials, and since we all tend to learn in slightly different manners, and differ in the amount of detail we need, there may not be quite enough detail in the training programs at certain points. Like I said, it’s easier to see what’s needed to teach and achieve control than it is to see exactly what’s needed to teach and have success in your young dog developing into a good blind running dog. Maybe this can fill in a few blanks and provoke some thinking on your part. Good control in our game tends to be much more of an either/or proposition, while competent and confident blind running tends to involve much more in the way of the dog understanding and discriminating small or subtle differences in our expectations.



For the entire article, check out the Feb / March 2012 Hunting Retriever Magazine.

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