Master at arms

Geoff Garrod gives a whistle-stop tour of getting the basics right when training your dog for the field

- Geoff Garrod

I told you last month how I start to train my dogs to the standard I need in the field when pigeon or game shooting (Dog whistle politics, November 2020). I covered steadiness, recall and stop. These are essential lessons that your dog has to comply with and the very foundations of training a working dog.

An unruly dog is both annoying and distracting. It can also be dangerous with loaded guns around – for human and dog. If your dog sees a pricked bird lumber across the field and land in a hedgerow next to a road, and it sets off of its own accord to retrieve it, you need to be able to instantly stop your dog and call it back. So, work on steadiness as long as necessary and continue with this throughout its training. Without it, you won’t progress to the next stages.

I’m going to presume that you now have a steady dog and it will obey your whistle commands: short repeated pips for return and a long blast for stop, sit and look at me. Dummy work from a very young age is also something that most dogs love to do. This training should be fun and I’ve never had a dog that won’t run off to collect a dummy and bring it back to me. Just remember to give them lots of praise when they do. Always make sure that they wait for your command to go for the dummy, though.