Retrieve Shaping, Shore-handling

This morning the dogs and I drove to Cheltenham, not to train with the FT group, but to take advantage of the technical ponds there for continued work on the shore-handling toolkit (SHTK). I believe that we could probably run the kind of land series the FT group was sometimes setting up during the cold weather, but until we have developed our shore-handling skills, trying to run land-water series with more advanced dogs would be counterproductive. In three separate areas of the property, we had three groups of sessions:

• Series A. Retrieve shaping (both dogs)
• Series B. SHTK tool #2, stage #1 (both dogs)
• Series C. SHTK tool #2, stages #1-2 (both dogs)
  

Series A. As usual lately, we ran some short poorman marks with ducks to see if any problems in the dogs' retrieves showed up.

Both dogs did fine with simple land retrieves, but when I threw the ducks to the other side of a large pool of standing water, both dogs showed some discomfort. Lumi displayed it by slowing down in her pick-up of the duck, while Laddie picked up the duck but then dawdled rather than coming straight back.

I didn't need to walk or drive away, nor to take the bird away, to repair the problems for either dog. In both cases, as soon as I waded out into the water (I wore high, rubber boots), and the dog realized that I was about to take the bird away, the dog immediately entered the water. I would then turn and race the dog to the SL. On subsequent throws, the dog would then pick up the duck and come back immediately.

Both dogs were in high spirits during this game and all day.

Series B. We started our shore-handling work with retrieves across the neck of the pond on the east side of the property where we worked previously. Laddie showed excellent progress since last time, and came back immediately on three retrieves in a row, without any beaching. Lumi continued to perform on this simple retrieve as well as before, perhaps showing more confidence entering the water than previously for some reason.

Series C. For this series, we moved to the channel at the west side of the developed area of the property. Alternating between first Lumi, then Laddie, while the other waited in the van, we ran three sessions of Tool #2 (Here-LTW-W).

The first two sessions were intended to exercise Stage 1 (no WS) of the tool:

1. Throw two dummies onto the far embankment.
   
2. Send the dog from heel.
   
3. As the dog comes out of the water at the far shoreline, call the trained cue "shake". The idea is that if the dog is going to shake off, I want him/her to do so before picking up the dummy, because I don't want the dog to pick up the dummy, then put it down again to shake off. As the dogs become more comfortable with turning and immediately re-entering the water, I may drop this step in the future.
   
4. As the dog picks up the dummy, auto-whistle recall. Intermittently, I omit this step, with the objective of being able to increasingly rely on the recall as an automatic behavior.
5. Take delivery of the dummy at heel.
6. Reinforce with high-value treat (cheeseburger for Lumi, liverwurst and turkey dogs for Laddie).
7. Repeat steps 2-6 so that dog gets two retrieves per session.
   

The dogs both did so well with Stage 1 even in this new location that I decided to try them out on Stage 2 (whistling sit, then recall). Therefore, the third session was identical to the first two, except that we did three retrieves:

1. Start by throwing three dummies onto the road beyond the far embankment.
2. Run one retrieve without a stop, as described above.
   
3. After the first retrieve, again send the dog.
4. Dog picks up dummy, turns back toward water.
5. Blow WS, dog sits while holding dummy.
6. Call "here". I believe I could also whistle recall here. I'm not sure which is preferred at this stage in our training.
   
7. Reinforce with jackpot, several high-value treats.
8. Run one more retrieve without a stop as described above.
   

Both dogs performed the stopped version of Tool #2 correctly the first time, which pleased me.

Simply the Trained Retrieve over Water? Despite the cryptic notation of the SHTK tools, what we were practicing today was nothing more than a trained retrieve over water. For a dog with a sufficiently reliable recall, no training for Tool #2 would be required. You'd simply throw the dummy across the channel, and the dog would retrieve the dummy.

Nonetheless, for both of my dogs — Lumi several months ago, Laddie in the immediate past — it just wasn't that simple. For my dogs, the first time I sent them on a land-water-land retrieve, or even to a dummy in the water at the far shoreline, the dog would become trapped on the far shore no matter how insistently I cued recall.

I cannot say whether this is because my dogs have an unusually weak recall, or because water would present a significant barrier for any dog's recall. Another way to say this is that any dog requires the recall to be proofed, but perhaps some dogs do not require any specific proofing for recall during a land-water-land retrieve.

In the future perhaps I, or some other trainer working without an ecollar, will begin training Tool #2 using a dog with an unquestionably well-established recall. If the dog still has a problem with beaching on the far shore in the early training, we'll know that this is a problem for any dog being trained without an ecollar. If the dog doesn't have the problem, we'll know that the problem wasn't the lack of an ecollar, but an inadequately trained recall for my particular dogs at the time that Tool #2 training was begun.