I always start by teaching a straight line back. To begin with, the dog always sees the retrieves and through repetition of a signal and command it gains that trust. Therefore it is important that in the early stages the dog should always be successful. The key to directional training is that the dog has to have complete trust in you and that when you send it in a particular direction there will be something for it to find. The lessons of sit, stay (at a distance), being steady to thrown dummies, and a good delivery of the retrieve, all have to be firmly embedded into the dog’s training, if you try and bypass any of these basics you will only create problems that you will then have to try and rectify at a later date. If you plan to enter working tests, scurries or field trials, your competition career will be very shortlived if your dog cannot be directed on to a blind retrieve.īefore you can even consider starting directional training with your dog you have to make sure the foundations are all in place. I shoot over my dogs on small walked-up/roughshooting days and I considered it an absolute necessity to be able to handle my dog on to the line of a runner or to a dead bird that dog has not seen down. If you plan just to go beating with your dog, then you may never need to send the dog out in a particular direction, and there is a train of thought that if you are only going to go roughshooting the same may apply. Depending on the kind of dog work you intend to do, you may know that it needs to be trained to take hand signals and to be able to be sent back, left or right.

Hand signals for dog training