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Many people say you should always take a tennis ball and a racquet when you go for a walk
with your gundog. It is, they insist, a perfect training opportunity. Top gundog trainer Howard
Kirby has lots more to say on the subject of tennis balls.
We need our spaniels, all of our dogs really to enter cover in order to find game with
a retriever to go and find it and with a spaniel to go and flush and get in there. So we make
the game enjoyable. We roll a tennis ball into soft cover not too harsh cover at this
stage otherwise there is a danger you will frighten him. Too many prickles in his face
he might not want to go in there again. So it is a gradual build up again. What we did
was we put a ball into the cover, we just encouraged the dog to hunt, I did what we
call clicked him off. I made a noise that indicated that I wanted him to start hunting,
so where is it then ... so he starts to hunt and gradually over a period of months he gets
familiar with that command and he thinks oh there must be something for me to find, he
starts to hunt and blow me he finds a tennis ball. What happens is he thinks my dad is
really great because every time he tells me to hunt I find a tennis ball. So if he tells
me to hunt, then I am going to do it every time. That is
the secret. And we build that up so that the dog hunts for longer with less aids from you.
He gets more powerful. He holds an area and enters cover and pick it up. What we also
do there is as soon as he has picked it up he has to come out and deliver it to hand.
So he comes out and retrieves, delivers the bird or ball to hand. We then develop that
exercise up because more often than not a spaniel will be used for flushing and not
for retrieving out of cover so much. So he goes in to cover where there is no ball. Bearing
in mind we have conditioned him that when you say start hunting he starts hunting. So
while he is hunting I flick a ball in the air, we fire a pretend shot, *** or fire
a starting pistol and we are starting to simulate the whole process, the process he will go
through on live game in the future. So we are teaching him to sit to the flush, look
and when we say get out, he will go out and retrieve.
Howard runs Mullenscote Gundogs from Lains Shooting School near Andover in Hampshire.
Visit Mullenscote.co.uk. 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