The Retrieve

[Casper]

This has been on mind quite frequently latley and I havent been able to come up with a solution.

With one dog it is easy to develope the natural retrieve at an early age. Most people enjoy tossing things for their puppies to bring back to them. It is fun and keeps the puppy motivated to do something. Eventually this is overlayed in to the field when it comes to the recovery of shot game and becomes the iceing on the cake. As I increase the number of dogs I own the play retrieve becomes increasingly more dificult to do (thankfully there are good breeding practices out there )

I hear and see of many rescued dogs of all breeds mixed and pure that are taken into a home and in short time they pick up the game of play retrieve.

If you had a dog that did not pick up on the play retrieve but wanted or needed that dog ot retrieve how would you go about gettign the dog to bring back things that are tossed for it?

I ask cause I have a dog that has baffled me with everythign that many dogs would have taken to right away. With her bird intorduction I developed enough of a chase that she now will go for the object but will either not pick it up, sit down to chew on it, run toward it but go completely past it pretending to ignore it, etc.

All these things lead to teh obvios of the "trained retrieve," I would rather have somethign to work with first before trying ot train it into a dog. I was able to brign out the natural point in this dog so I am in the belief that the retrieve is in there too I just need to find the right key to open the right door.

[markj]

If you had a dog that did not pick up on the play retrieve but wanted or needed that dog ot retrieve how would you go about gettign the dog to bring back things that are tossed for it?

I have done this in the past wit hgreat success, get the dog interested in any kind of toy. Take dog into a hallway use a check cord, get the dog to stay by you and toss the object a short distance away from you, when the dog goes for it let him, then when the object is in his mouth say fetch or what ever word you use and gently pull the dog towards you. Do this a few times and soon the dog will get it and you can leave the check cord off. I then move outside and slowly progress to a find and seek thing where I hide the object and let the dog work it out by nose, I also drag the object along the ground to shed some scent for the nose work. After this I use a live quail, things get moving fast after this, I will then move to pointing stuf and eventually shoot a quail over the dog with a lite load. This seems t owork for me altho most of my dogs fetch naturally.