A Couple of Important Things - written by Butch Goodwin of Northern Flight

A Couple of Important Things

ost amateur trainers may not give much thought to the two topics that I am going to discuss in this column. But I guarantee you that many of the most successful professionals keep training records to some degree to chart the progress of the dogs they are training. And maintaining mental contact with your dog is something that pros seem to understand but amateurs are likely to pass off as hocus-pocus!

Keeping Training Records

Charting your retriever’s day-to-day training can provide a broad overview of the progress that you and your dog are making and where you have left holes that may need to be reviewed. Likewise, a training record staring you in the face daily — kind of like a “to do” list — can also serve as a constant reminder of those exercises that you probably need to work on but may think are boring or just keep putting off. If you are consistent and truthful in your approach to your grading and tracking of information, these records can afford you the opportunity to see, in black and white, why your dog excels at certain aspects of his training or at a particular test but fails miserably at others. If you have aspirations of successfully participating in field trials or hunt tests, accurate and thorough training records and notes about the tests that certain judges seem to prefer can prove to be a tremendous benefit for planning your training sessions.

This Basic Training form is available in full size by clicking on the desired page. Front of Page and Back of Page

Consider taking the time to copy or download the forms that I have included or develop a design more fitting to your own training, and use them religiously and honestly. You will find them to be an obvious and valuable benefit to your training. And, at some point, you will be able to look back on your records and kick yourself in the butt for overlooking a particular (perhaps seemingly unimportant at the time) step in your dog’s training, or pat yourself on the back for a job well-done.

The forms that I have presented here are the ones that work for me. I originally designed them around my individual training program and have utilized them for many years with only minor changes. You will find these are designed to utilize either 8 1/2 x 11 or 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 paper. You can fit the forms in a full-sized notebook or binder; if you choose to use them in a smaller format, they will also fit in a 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 three-ring binder or notebook. Or, of course, you can take the basic idea and design your own. Included are my charts for grading basics, and another for grading more advanced work. I grade the various categories on a daily basis with a letter grade of A, B, C, D, or F-just like school grades. The numbers along the top of the sheets, front and back, correspond to the days of the month.

Additionally, I use a daily log sheet, which is also included. The log sheet has a place for the dog’s name, date, time, weather, a description of the training done, and any problems or corrections encountered. On the opposite side of the log sheet is a spot for a diagram of the training or test and a spot below for additional notes. The log sheet also works well for recording the tests that you run and how your dog did in a field trial or hunt test simply by adding the name of the judges.

My suggestion to anyone wanting to make use of these forms would be to take from them what works for you and redesign them to meet your particular needs. But, use them! They will pay off big dividends and you will be glad that you made the effort.

One last word on grading: Be objective; and if you’re a beginner, ask an experienced trainer to give you a hand in assigning grades to begin with; what looks like an “A” to you might only be a “B-” to someone who’s seen a lot of dogs.

This Advanced Training form is available in full size by clicking on the desired page. Front of Page and Back of Page

Maintaining Mental Contact

Now, I know that some readers may think I have gone off the deep end, but the subject of directing all of your concentration and maintaining mental contact with your dog at all times when training, hunting, or running him in a test is very important. When a dog and the trainer break mental contact - i.e., when the trainer’s concentration is directed elsewhere - the drill or the test that the dog is being run on is effectively ended. Most long-time trainers would be quick to agree that dogs have some degree of ESP and know - even at a long distance - when mental concentration with the trainer is broken and no longer directed at them. This concept is often quite difficult for humans to understand because over the eons of evolution, it seems that we have lost the close, intuitive link with animals that we once had. Now such phenomena get explained away as “not being supported by clinical evidence” or simply as coincidence.

If you doubt this wisdom and don’t believe that dogs have a higher level of perception or mental telepathy than we understand or give them credit for, try to find an explanation for this example: Several years back, a fellow called me who was a pilot with the Air National Guard. I had trained a dog that was a littermate to his Labrador, and he was looking for somewhere to kennel his dog for about a week. He could have taken him to a boarding kennel but asked if I would take him and maybe just do some simple obedience training while he was gone. It was a time of the year when I wasn’t particularly busy and I had a couple of empty kennels, so I agreed. When he brought the dog out, he told me that he and his wife were going on a belated honeymoon.

I put the dog in his kennel, wished them a good trip, and he left; this was on a Friday morning. All went well with the dog until the following Tuesday, when at around 1:00 in the afternoon, the dog started barking and yapping uncontrollably and nearly jumped over the top of a six-foot kennel run. He hadn’t demonstrated this kind of behavior since his arrival more than four days earlier, and it made an impression on me that something was really
bugging him. I was even considering putting a bark collar on the dog because he was causing a ruckus among the other dogs in the kennel.

About 4:00, I went inside to find a message from the dog’s owner. He had been called back to the base because of some sort of a mission that his squadron was being called up to fly, somewhere in the Middle East, I believe. He asked on the message if it would be all right for his wife to come out later that evening and pick up his dog. When I called him back to confirm the time that she would be here, I told him of the dog’s erratic behavior. As it turned out, they had flown back into the airport at almost exactly 1:00. that afternoon - almost to the minute when the commotion started. The airport is 47 miles away!

This Training Log form is available in full size by clicking on the desired page. Front of Page and Back of Page

Here is another story, but this one emphasizes my point about staying in mental contact with your dog: In the mid-1980s, I was running a really nice Chesapeake bitch of mine in an AKC Master Hunter test in Utah. The test was a water blind that ran along the edge of a pond. Cattail pockets dotted the edge of the pond, and the idea was to skim the edge of the cattails and pick up the duck that was planted just short of the shore on the far side of the pond. So, I lined my dog up and sent her. In two or three casts, I had her line corrected and she was swimming straight toward the blind. I followed her closely with my eyes and my concentration until she was within about (what appeared to be) less than a foot of the planted duck.
At that point, one of the judges said, “Nice job,” and I turned around to thank him. I broke my concentration, and she swam right past the floating duck and on into the cattails. Someone watching said, “You better find your dog.” It took me about 10 minutes to get her back. I honestly feel that my concentration and mental contact with her was broken and, even though she was heading in the opposite direction and not looking at me, she felt it or knew it. No one will ever convince me otherwise.

The moral of this story is: Even if you don’t believe in a dog’s level of ESP, don’t break your concentration or eye contact with your dog during training or until the dog has made the retrieve, returned to your side, and the bird is in your hand!

And this idea of dogs having a level of mental telepathy that we don’t understand is not something that just came out of current New Age thinking. William Brown wrote about it in his 1942 book, How To Train Hunting Dogs. Mr. Brown, who was also the editor of American Field magazine, devoted an entire chapter in his book to “Telepathic Communication Between Trainer and Dog” in which he points out examples of trainers influencing dogs in the shooting field and at the field trials through mental communication. It is worth reading if you have the opportunity.

Over the years (and before I knew better), I have made the mistake of breaking concentration and, as a result, I have learned my lesson - nothing, short of an earthquake, will break my mental contact with a dog that I am working with. Just last summer, I was handling a terrific young male Chesapeake on a three leg lining pattern across the pond. My young helper had planted the bumper piles for me and put them a bit closer together than I told him, making the angles to the piles relatively tight. But I knew that it would be a nice difficult test of the dog’s handling, so I went ahead and ran the three lines.

I had run the dog on the two outside lines and was working on the third in the center, when the young man helping me said, “You have some ticks crawling up your leg.” Even with shorts on, I refused to break my mental concentration with this talented young dog, at least until he had the final bumper in his mouth and was on the way back - ticks or no ticks. And, as a result, the dog hung in there with me and took all of my casts. He did a really fine job. The ticks could wait - they don’t move that fast, anyhow.