Scott Linden Outdoors

I hope you’re having a fantastic season so far. We are off to a good start, with camaraderie, beautiful places, and some success finding birds. Now, if my shooting would match!

Flick is meeting or exceeding expectations so far this season in all but one category: retrieving. As you may recall, I’m experimenting with a gentle version of “force breaking,” without ear or toe-pinching, and e-collar vibration as the strongest “stimulus” when needed. He was pretty good about opening his mouth to take bumpers and birds as a youngster, which is what the pinching thing is often about. Once learned, and associated with the “fetch” command, things progressed smoothly.

We moved to out-and-back, off the training table, new locations, retrieving after tossed dead and ultimately shot birds … all with minimal problems. But on last weekend’s chukar hunt, the wheels came off. The few shot birds I put on the ground were a crap shoot. Would he bring it back? Run off? Both, then try to swallow it? All of the above, at one point.

Maybe you’ve been there.

It finally hit me. The “X” factor was my hunting partner Tom, and his dog Ruby. What I hadn’t trained for was a hyper-excited dog (Flick) working with “competition.” As a predator, he’s ready, willing, and able to keep his prey from others … simply by swallowing … sometimes, preceded by a few crunches. I was reminded of a previous dog and a club “fun” day that was anything but, when another dog tried to take Bill’s quail. Gone in sixty seconds … urp.

Well, we’re back to about Square Three now, working on that last few steps of delivering in spite of other dogs and people. I’m hoping it’s the happy ending to a pretty good training experiment, but I’ll let you know.

This blog post outfitted by Cabela’s …