Works in progress

Bob, beautiful dog! It's nice to see that you opted to carve those divers with their tails in a natural position; not pasted low to the water like an alert bird about to take off. Flynn and I are back home, too. The first thing I did was run over to at Snyder's Drug to pick up bandaids...just gotta love puppy teeth! Kane is fast enough to avoid them, we (Karen and I) apparently have glacial pace motor response times! The laundry room wood trim is about to be "remodeled" for the fifth time since the house was built built seventeen years ago.
 
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..just gotta love puppy teeth! .
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Tell me about it! But she is starting to catch on that ankle-biting gets her put in solitary ;-) Lately she's been eyeing my wife's canvas "sky chair" that's hanging out in the yard.

We went down to the creek today - just let her explore and do as she pleased. Easy to see that water is going to be this one's friend.
 
She is beautiful Bob. You are going to have a lot of fun with that pup.

I have my own work in progress that is sleeping at my feet while I type this. Drake is coming up on 9 months and is really starting to settle down. He loves to retrieve a bumper to hand and proudly sits at a heel waiting for the next toss. When I add in a duck wing he seems to have a hard time resisting chewing though. Working on that. LOL Always something.
 
The vast majority of the time thus far, easily 90%, he gets "bitey" when he has to poop. The remaining ten percent is him being aggressive...he loves to go for the Achilles tendon because he used to get picked-up immediately (We watched weekly videos of the litter during their development, prior making our puppy choice.).

We teach,Ouch, as a command. We combine it with a quick "pinch" encirclement of the pup's muzzle with thumb and forefinger, combined with the scolding forefinger gesture. If the dog doesn't respond, they get solitary. Eventually, the scolding forefinger is all that is necessary to get the dog to stop. Down-the-road this alleviates an eighty pound dog from stepping on us or walking over us, or our appendages. He has learned to "sit" on voice command thus far, so we can get a leash and collar on him prior going "outside", as well as knowing what "outside" means-the latrine. He was likely on his way to becoming the "bully" of his litter based on when he gets "bitey". The pecking order in his new "pack" is slowly getting shuffled. Hopefully, after eight dogs, we will be able to avoid/minimize conditioning-in unwanted behaviors over the course of his early training.

Our complications thus far: biblical rainfall level for three days since I arrived back home. We also had a yearling doe drop her fawn less than a hundred feet from our back deck in a high stem-count thicket. Luckily, she relocated it within the first twenty-four hours post-partum. It would scoot for about sixty feet at a pop toward the doe and then sequentially "crash".




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I didn't realize I had the camera on auto-focus when I took this, consequently it "grabbed" the red oaks in the foreground...
 
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We combine it with a quick "pinch" encirclement of the pup's muzzle with thumb and forefinger, combined with the scolding forefinger gesture. If the dog doesn't respond, they get solitary.
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No real aggression here, but just a pups need to chew.
We do the muzzle pinch with a slap to the encircling hand from below and the "no" command. This is followed by redirection to a rawhide square from our industrial sized bag of them. Key is getting everyone on board with doing the correction. Like with you , a hard-head response gets solitary, but it doesn't take long to see improvement.

Repetition, repetition, consistency, consistency.

Had to chuckle at Paul's note that at 9 mos. his dog is settling down. Labs - Perpetual 5 year olds!

Also glad that no fawns have been dropped in the yard behind us as was the case last year!

Outside the studio this a.m. - calmly reflecting on her next mischief no doubt:
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That's a great picture Bob. She has a mischievous look in her eye.

Oddly my 9 month old is in many respects more settled than my 5 year old. He still gets the occasional bout of stubbornness but they are fewer all the time. His attention span still needs some work. LOL
 
I think we are through with the aggression issue. We "went to the mattresses" three times over the course of the day yesterday, the third time I pinned him on his back, he submitted immediately with no struggle. He is pretty "pliant".

The breeder has a puppy playground, with a variety of plastic jungle gym toys for the puppies. One of these is a fabric agility tunnel about twelve feet long that she talks the dogs through. How he approached and handled these obstacles during videos of their play sessions, as well as the fact that he flash-points, moved us to go with him as our puppy choice out of the three males in the litter. I once owned a dog (labrador retriever)that would point woodcock routinely-very nice aid to get in position to miss with the first barrel...you, know, just to get a better shooting lane to connect with the second "tube"! Not many years left where I can still out-walk my initial dog in the grouse woods. Having a new dog to train is an excellent "tonic".
 
Both great looking pups. Between your pictures and comments and the puppy pictures from Al Hansen I'm getting a bad case of puppy fever. You're both in for a fun summer and many years of memories in the duck marsh. Enjoy
 
Bob, there is no doubt that Scooter will be at the top of the priority list for the next 3 months, then duck and goose season opens. You will be busy having fun! Makes you a lucky guy.
Al
 
Hey, Rick, I liked what you had to say: "we (Karen and I) apparently have glacial pace motor response times!" Are you referring to what is taking place now or back when moving a foot during the year might have been a lot?

I really like your work in progress. What a great looking pup. It is always a challenge when Alpha male is sitting by your side. I can hardly wait to see him a year from now. By they way, how old is he now? Best of luck with your training. Is this a red variety?

That second shot is what Springtime is all about. Thanks for including it.
Al
 
Al, he is Kane's half-brother;a Pocklea Remus descendant, as was his gandfather (dam side) and great grandfather (sire side), Craighorn Bracken. As the breeder would remind us, this is the original yellow phase color into the 1940's, when light yellow dogs slowly became the dominant color for the yellow phase. Craighorn Bracken won the British National Championship in 2001. What I think is more noteworthy, he finished in the top three for two years prior that win. UK and International trials are structured to focus on game finding ability, with a lower emphasis on handling to a mark. Creeping, barking, popping,and leaving the area of the mark on dead birds, are all disqualification behaviors. Kane has a very soft mouth, and he doesn't pop. I have never had him give-up on a cripple on his own in two seasons-even after my huge error in sending him for that crippled goose last fall. His lining is pretty ragged beyond sixty yards or so, largely because I teach our dogs to quarter for upland game. We have been really impressed with how quickly he has adjusted to his new pack member;zero friction thus far. Karen was right.

I would have liked to space them four years apart, but we decided we shouldn't pass-up this breeding.

Karen pulls away and gets cut as a consequence more often than I do from puppy teeth. I try to teach "NO" and slowly get my hand away, since I can't match his reaction time.
 
Rick, I had forgotten about the color phase. Thanks for mentioning it. As for what you said about quartering I will never stop my dogs from doing that. I much prefer to seeing it just because by taking this action they are using what genetic traits they were gifted with. Nothing like a lab that can quarter while looking for a downed bird in dense foliage. This is something I prefer.

I sure don't blame you for being able to secure such a great pup when you did. Good for you.
Al


One day for fun I sent this picture to the couple who owns the kennel where we got our two chocolate females. Kelly uses his labs as upland game bird retrievers and he sent me a reply saying that their father, Striker, has some pointing lab blood in him. This is the only time I have ever seen a pup doing this. I didn't have a pigeon or a dead duck hidden but the pup was watching very intently another of his litter mates that was hiding behind a crepe myrtle.
Al

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Great picture, Al! Flynn's flash points have essentially "appeared" in roughly the same situation;when he is tentatively determining what physical response to manifest...

Our foliage up here doesn't "bite-back" to anything resembling the same degree that yours does! Were those black berries or black raspberries? Black berry thickets and thornapple are the only thing really daunting thickets in the U.P. Well...then there are porcupines, too!
 
Nearly all my our dogs mark short when we first start retrieving drill work. This technique really improves a dog's marking skills.
Reworking my overall training plan outline...

Here is that marking/memory article from DU:

http://www.ducks.org/hunting/retriever-training/marking-enhancement-part-iii
 
Bob - apologies for my ignorance but what is that platform she is sitting on? something you also use for hunting?
 


That's just an elevated, mesh dog bed, Kyle. An extension of "sit," "stay," & place-board obedience training we've been doing on a daily basis. At 13 weeks, she has learned the command and we are now at the point where we keep extending the time and have introduced more and more distractions while she is on "place"

The long term idea is that when she has been given the the "place" command she needs go to that place and get all 4 paws on it. If for an extended period, the dog can sit, lay, etc, but needs to stay on that place.

Beyond the obvious adaptation to her "place" in the boat or a blind, it becomes a useful behavior in the house for everything from control when someone rings the front doorbell, to getting out of the way of the person loading the dishwasher (instead of hopping on it to lick plates every time someone is loading it). :-) :-) Wives appreciate that. :-) :-)

For field-trialers or hunt testers, the longer term adaptation would be the transition to steadiness at the line with no creeping.

Right now we rotate by using the place board, the truck-kennel pad (which also serves as a spot to lay on in the house), and this elevated mesh dog bed.

IMO early obedience training is more important that the retrieving play we're also doing. I'm impressed when people tell me how their 5 month-old pup can do a 125 yard mark; but not so much when that same dog at 2-yrs old can't sit still for 5 minutes, is completely out of control, or bolts into the water every time a gun goes off.

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