Gundog Day
I don’t have a gundog breed (have you noticed?) and much as I like Labradors and Spaniels, I don’t think I’d ever consider owning one. Just not my cup of tea! But the opportunity came up to go on a “Gundog for the Non-Shooting Owner” workshop with Jane Hanshaw, who I’ve always heard good things about, and I couldn’t resist. We get a lot of gundogs in our agility classes and they definitely have a different mindset to other breeds, and I was curious to discover if there was anything we could suggest for more effective rewarding. So I signed up and figured I’d take Dylan and just learn what I could.
As it turned out, Dylan loved being a gundog. He even got to be the demo dog a few times!
We did some nosework/scent games, impulse control and dummy retrieves, and then begun teaching the dogs to respond to the gundog whistle. I have done some nosework with Dyl before so I knew he’d enjoy that, and he’s got impulse control all sewn up. I’ve never used a whistle though, and so that was a lot of fun for me to learn as well as Dyl! He picked up the recall whistle very quickly, and the group did some recalls calling off a dragged lure toy (which Dyl wouldn’t chase to begin with, I don’t think we achieved much there!). We then progressed to learning a retrieve over a hurdle using the whistle, which Dyl was great at.
Final test was to teach a sit to the whistle. Dylan picked that up surprisingly quickly, and then the real test came in teaching an emergency stop to the whistle, where the dogs had to recall and then sit when they heard the sit whistle command. Jane played with Dylan for a while on that, so I don’t think I can take credit for training him, but he was awesome at it!
I was a little anxious as there were 11 dogs altogether in a reasonably large sports hall, but it’s a venue that Dylan hasn’t been to before and he only knew Diva in the group. I wasn’t sure if it might be too overwhelming for him, but he settled down very quickly and was soon working with absolutely no anxiety or nervousness. I think this was partly to do with gundogs being so damn quiet even when excited; not a bark was heard except from my Border Collie.
I learnt tons on this workshop. I’m actually considering pursuing it a bit further with Dylan! He really loved the work, and I thought Jane was fantastic. There’s a Search and Rescue nosework/tracking day coming up which sounds just up Dylan’s alley, so hopefully I’ll be able to fit it in this summer.