There are times in your training sessions and in groups of training sessions that you must re-trace your steps with a specific dog for a specific training goal. Also, you must be willing to try new tactics in order to get past a sticky training situation.

This past month I have been working with some novice field trainers and have actually learned quite a bit from them because they are two great obedience trainers just moving their dogs to field work. They have taught me that in order to sometimes cross a training barrier, one must step back and look at the problem from the dog’s perspective. Guess WHAT? That worked great in trying to get Bella back into the game of lining and blind retrieves; after all she is the only Quail Unlimited Flushing Dog of the Year and a great all-around hunting dog, but she would not leave the line with a hand in front of her face (due to over-zealous collar correction on my part).  So looking at the problem from her perspective, I took the hand away and took a hard step forward and said “fetch”, she left the line at a gallop for the dummy.

Currently we are doing lining drills out to 75 yards without the use of a hand in her face to line her up. She is doing exactly what is asked of her, and I have not had to use any amount of collar correction. Collar correction on Bella will cause her to shut down because I was an over-zealous trainer when she was younger.

It took a month to figure out what it would take to get Bella over this training hump for running blind retrieves, but she is looking like a million bucks right now. Remember that if the tried and true method is not working with your dog, try another approach that is not exactly traditional and your dog will probably surprise you with learning the drill you had such difficulty teaching.