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The hare is down. Here is the kind of retrieve that takes months of careful work to achieve.
And here is top gundog trainer Ricky Moloney to explain how to achieve it.
What you are seeing there is you are actually seeing dogs, open dogs that have been trained
to a high level. On a shooting day would you be sending dogs those distances, probably
not, but the reason that we are training dogs to go those distances is if we get birds that
plain down a long way, by the time you have walked over that bird has made good its escape.
The quicker you can get a dog to the fall with as little disturbance as possible, hopefully
the quicker you can put that game in the bag. So it was of no benefit that retrieve to my
dogs. So what I did was offer it over to another one of the dog handlers. He sent his dog,
really it is a straight line, when we retrieve it is a straight line, he sent his dog up,
he got it up onto the rise, dog started just to cast, little bit of whistling, little bit
of handling, push the dog back. It is teaching that dog that if it believes the handler it
is going to get success. Dogs don't understand distance. I think a dog doesn't understands
how far something is. Back
means go back. Left means left and right means right. So if you limit your dog's training
to only ever doing 30 odd retrieves that becomes the norm. If you are stretching that dog and
once it can do 30 yards, putting it then to 50 yards and then 70 yards and building it
up before long the dog doesn't think about distance. You give it the line and it ... it
out until you either tell it that that is the area or it finds it itself.
Ricky Moloney runs Ribblesdale Labradors. This series on gundog training tips is brought
to you by Skinners Petfoods, maker of the Field & Trial range of gundog feeds. Visit
SkinnersPetfoods.co.uk