I had three goals for today’s training session, two of which were to occur together, and the third afterwards. I’ll describe them in two posts. This is the first one, where we worked on the first two goals.

One of the goals was for Laddie, my Golden, and that was just to give him a chance to do some retrieving. My injury has made that difficult, and he’s gotten little work the last two months. So today we brought along Peter, who has become my primary assistant, and one of his friends, Evan, who has worked with us before and did a nice job today as well. That enabled Laddie to run some singles, with Peter handling and Evan throwing. We worked in a field with uneven terrain and varied cover, hardly the most challenging Laddie has run but at least of some interest. Besides, it would probably be best to phase him back into more demanding work after the long layoff anyway.

In theory we could have run doubles. I can’t throw, or at least I don’t think it would be safe for my spine, but I could probably handle from a chair. However, I had another job to do, which was for our order goal: conditioning Lightning to gunfire.

So I sat in my chair with Lightning accompanying me on a short lead, no particular activity available. Peter handled Laddie form a start line 30y away, and Evan threw bumpers from various positions further away from Lightning and me. For the first throw, Evan was 120y away from us. All three of us had radios to coordinate our work.

My “equipment” was a warm hot dog from a convenience store, broken into a dozen or so large chunks.

Each trial went as follows:

• Peter would call Laddie to heel, lock him in on Evan, and call for the throw.
• Evan would fire the pistol, loaded with 209 primers, and throw a white bumper.
• In the next instant, as Lightning looked around to find the source of the sound, I offered first one, and then a second, chunk of hot dog, which he ate in his puppy nibbling way, a new flavor for him and one much to his liking.
• Meanwhile, Laddie completed the retrieve and Peter threw a few happy bumpers for him to add even more fun and exercise to his experience.
• I then used the radio to reposition Evan for the next throw, closer to us each time, while Peter continued to use the same start line, repeating until Evan was only 50y from us. I then moved Peter and his start line to a new location 10y from us, and Evan to throw another 20y from there. He did his best to provide Laddie with a relatively interesting retrieve, considering the short distance.
• Finally, I had Peter and Evan reverse positions. Now Laddie would be running toward us rather than away on his send out, and the gunfire was only 10y away. I used my last two chunks of hot dog. By now, gunfire was old hat to Lightning. He heard the gunshot and enjoyed his hot dog chunks.

Lightning now knew, or rather had been conditioned to the fact, that gunfire predicts good things, and Laddie had gotten some work in. Both our first two goals had been accomplished.

In my next post, I’ll describe our work on the third goal we had set for the session.