Kicking the
Cigaring Habit

written by Butch Goodwin
       of                     

Northern Flight Retrievers  

Kicking the Cigaring Habit

ake a look in Webster’s for the word, "cigaring," and you probably won’t find much. As a matter of fact, you probably won’t find a reference to it at all. Run a Google search, and you will come up with some websites about wine and cigars or Kennedy’s 1962 Cuban embargo and its effect on cigar quality, and you might even see some not-too-family-oriented websites, as well. Yet the subject of how to prevent or how to cure cigaring seems to come up as a recurrent question on the retriever training discussion groups and in my e-mails and phone calls, time and again.

Cigaring is the tendency of some dogs to insist on carrying bumpers sticking straight out or their mouths - like a cigar - rather than carrying them crosswise, as is normally accepted. It can also be an extremely frustrating habit to break in an older dog if it’s not corrected when he’s a youngster.

It's all about changing the cigaring mindset, and preventing a bad habit from starting in the first place.

The standard answer that most professional trainers and experienced amateurs will give for curing the habit of cigaring is to put the dog through a complete course in mouth conditioning and force-fetch: teach and reinforce holding and carrying bumpers and birds correctly without mouthing or dropping them, and learn to fetch on command and consistently deliver to hand. This should certainly correct the problem; but not everyone has the expertise or feels comfortable putting their dog through a force-fetch program, and many "week-end" trainers simply don’t have the extra money or desire to send their dog away to a pro. So they simply ignore the problem and learn to live with it; what’s the big deal, anyhow? "If my dog carries birds correctly, why should I concern myself with how he carries bumpers?"

I am in agreement that the best way to cure the habit is by mouth conditioning and a force-fetch program, but a dog that has a tendency to carry bumpers sticking straight out of his mouth is likely to also drop bumpers and birds and is possibly soft-mouthed to a fault. The overly soft-mouthed dog might pick the bumper up correctly, but as he runs back with it, he’ll let it slide around loosely until it drops out of his mouth entirely.

Another possible reason for cigaring is that, quite simply, the dog has been allowed to get into the habit of doing it. This is a habit that is often formed when youngsters don’t know (or care) how to acceptably pick up and carry bumpers. And that habit can start very innocently when an owner is "playing fetch" - making an undisciplined game out of retrieving - by waving a bumper around in front of the dog and tossing it at various distances to build the pup’s desire to retrieve. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but when the youngster is allowed to return every bumper flipping it around by the string or letting it stick out of his mouth, a problem is going to develop. His adrenaline is pumping, and he has elevated himself to a fever pitch because the game is uncontrolled, exciting, and wild.

Dogs, even puppies, are opportunists; it won’t take him long to realize that it is’ acceptable to carry bumpers in this manner. After all, the boss is pumped up, too, because his young prodigy is turning into a non-stop retrieving machine... Who cares how the bumpers get picked up or earned? We’ll deal with that issue when he gets older! Thus, a bad habit is started, one that will have to be corrected at some point in the future.

So, short of mouth conditioning and force-fetch, what is the answer? Well, you will notice that I used the word "cure" a couple of paragraphs back. In an effort to act rather than being forced to react and have to correct or cure bad habits, the answer is to not allow the habit of cigaring to ever get started. And not letting it get started may not be quite as difficult as you think.

I have tried a number of things over the years to teach youngsters to pick up and carry bumpers correctly right from the beginning. If I saw that a dog had the inclination to carry bumpers by the ends, the first thing I always tried was putting him in a "sit" and teaching him the correct position for holding a bumper while I walked him along doing heeling drills. This usually works really well at my side, but in the excitement of making the retrieve, most youngsters - seem to quickly forget the lessons they were taught and revert back to their old habits.

Another trick I tried came from one of the old-time trainers. His cure was to wrap wire, about 17-gauge diameter, around each end of a bumper. But he didn’t just wrap several turns of wire around the bumpers. He would wrap three short, individual pieces around each end, and twist each piece of the wire to hold it onto the bumper By making the twists on opposite sides of the bumper, it replicated small barbs, which made it uncomfortable to say the least, for the dog to grab the bumper by the ends. This may have worked out best for him, but I found that simply wrapping several tight turns of wire around each end of the bumper, sans the barb, broke the cigaring mindset and taught the dogs to carry them only by the center.

I also tried Dokken Deadfowl Trainers, which are designed to force a dog to carry them correctly. If a dog grabs them anywhere except by the body, it is uncomfortable, and he will likely have to readjust his grip to carry it correctly. Similarly, if he has a tendency to want to shake bumpers or birds, the floppy head on the Dokken will smack him in the side of the face, and he will, generally, stop the shaking. The dogs seem to love to retrieve these Deadfowl Trainers, but they are very expensive compared to the price of plastic bumpers.

y friend Juli Hermanns, an amateur trainer in Alaska, seems to have come up with an inexpensive but very effective way to start her young dog carrying bumpers correctly - she puts PVC reducers on the ends of some of her bumpers. Here’s how it works:

She buys 1 1/2" x 2 1/2" PVC reducers for the smaller diameter plastic bumpers. The 1 1/2" diameter slips almost perfectly over the ends of the bumper. If it doesn’t fit snugly, she uses some PVC glue to keep them from getting knocked off. I tried this size and also tried using 2 1/2" x 3" reducers on the larger sized plastic bumpers. The 2 1/2" end of the reducer can be forced onto the larger plastic bumper quite tightly and doesn’t generally need any glue. By using PVC reducers, it allows the rope to pass through the reducer to make it easier to throw, and, if you buy black PVC, it contrasts really well with white bumpers, making it quite easy to see at a distance.

Juli has discovered that having a reducer on each end effectively lifts
the bumper about a half-inch or so off of the ground, making it similar to a dumbbell. The dogs don’t seem to like grabbing the bumpers by the hard PVC ends and, because of the dumbbell shape, learn to grab them in the middle every time. Also, if you shorten the ropes so that they don’t protrude more than a couple of inches past the reducer, the dog that wants to carry the bumpers by the string and swing them around is foiled because there isn’t much for him to grab onto. And if he does, he gets smacked in the face by the hard PVC.

The PVC reducers should squeeze just perfectly on the ends of plastic bumpers.

I have a young male Chesapeake that, when he was a puppy, was developing the cigaring habit. As soon as I added the PVC reducers to the end of the bumpers, the habit ended immediately, and now he consistently carries all bumpers correctly - with or without the PVC ends. I feel that by adding them, correct mouth habits are learned, and I won’t have to later correct a problem I was allowing develop. I plan to always start all of my young dogs from this point forward on bumpers with PVC reducers on both ends. I am sold on its effectiveness.

Since Juli showed this to me, I have also begun using these same bumpers on my training table for hastening the transition from fetching out of my hand to fetching off of the table. It has made this often-difficult step much easier, as it raises the bumper just enough that the dog can grab it without having to slam his nose and mouth completely down against the table. Then, when I move ahead to having the dog fetch off of the ground, it makes the transition from fetching from the table to fetching off of the ground go much more smoothly also.

So, if you want to see your dog cleanly picking up and handling or if you see this cigaring problem getting started, there is no reason to let it become routine practice. It is simple enough to stop before it turns into a habit that will later have to be corrected.