Pick-up Drills

AM: Oaks Area 3, PM: Riggs Road

CONDITIONS: Bitter, subfreezing temps all day.

TRAINING: Continuing our work from yesterday afternoon, today we had two more session of short, simple poorman doubles, using one WD and one duck in good condition for each series.

In each case, both dogs waited at the SL while I threw the marks using gunfire.

For Lumi, my focus was on speedy pick-ups. Lumi was doing great by the end, but I expect regression so we'll keep working on this this week.

For Laddie, my focus was on building reinforcement history for picking up birds. To accomplish that, I used gunfire with the throws, treats for some of the deliveries, and a WD as the memory-bird since these days, oddly, Laddie seems to enjoy retrieving dummies more than birds. Laddie had some excellent, high-energy, high-speed, solid retrieves of the duck, encouraging me that Laddie is getting back to his old self.

In the afternoon session at the Riggs Road field, we also ran a delayed mark, as follows:

The mark was a duck thrown as a poorman single with a pistol shot at 40 yards. After the mark was down, the dog ran a 310-yard blind. Then the dog picked up the mark.

Laddie, running first, lined the blind. Lumi, running second, needed a WO after slipping a whistle, then did fine.