Pinball Drill

I remember that Alice Woodyard suggested we never return to the double-T, and I seem to recall that Mike Lardy says the same thing on his video. I don't remember the rationale any more, possibly that that drill involves returning to old marks, something a more advanced dog should not be encouraged to do.

However, this morning I had a very small time window and I wanted to give both dogs some handling practice, focusing what little time we had on handling rather than retrieving. So I used a variation of the pinball drill, but not just angle-backs. I placed a surveyors flag (SF) 50 yards from a start line, and then surrounded that SF with four more SFs about 20 yards distant at the diagonals for angle-in and angle-back casts.

I then sent each dog from heel to the center flag, and then handled the dog to each of the other four flags, making a square. That let us practice several different kinds of casts in a short amount of time, and the dogs both seemed to be motivated, though confused that they could never find anything to retrieve.

I'm thinking that if we always use a different location and/or orientation, we run a variety of patterns, we increase the distances to the point that the SFs aren't visible until the dog gets close (so that they don't think the lesson is "look for the flag"), and if the dogs keep up their motivation even though they don't get to retrieve, this could be a good drill when time is too limited to run a multiple blind or mark-and-blind series.