Whistling in the wind

Handlers should look at themselves rather than their dogs when things go wrong,

- Nick Ridley

In this time of lockdown, the internet and especially Facebook are full of training exercises for handlers and their dogs – some better than others, most attracting plenty of comments. Much of the advice revolves around the dog and not the handler, yet more often than not it is the handler who needs to change his or her understanding or body language as that can have a direct effect on the dog.

A few years back I was undertaking a photo commission at a shoot and the shoot captain had two rather smart-looking labradors. He was telling anyone within earshot that he had paid a lot of money for these two highly bred, fully-trained dogs from a well-known professional trainer. To be fair, they sat nicely at his side but at the end of a drive he turned them loose and by the end of the day they were running around like headless chickens. All the months of training had been forgotten. This wasn’t the dog’s fault nor the trainer’s, more a classic case of ‘operator’ error.