Another item in my PRT program, as in TRT and any good puppy program, is socialization. That means giving the dog an opportunity to meet many kinds of people of different ages, genders, and as many other variations as possible during the dog’s socialization window. Not just other people, but also other dogs, other kinds of pets, strange outfits like hiking gear, new locations, and so forth.

Of course Lightning knows our other two dogs, has met neighborhood dogs, and has met a few other people. But with my injury, I have been concerned that I have not done enough socialization in this limited time window.

What great fortune, then, when a childhood friend named Bette, who has stayed in touch and is probably the person who bequeathed me her love of dogs so many years ago via a big dog she owned named Steve, got in touch a few days ago offering to take Lightning for a visit. An extraordinary act of friendship at a perfect time in Lightning’s development.

So Renée fixed up a package with all the frozen meals, and Bette picked Lightning up a little while ago for a sleepover about 50 miles from here. She’ll bring him back tomorrow evening. Till then, I’ll still have Laddie as my dog to sleep and cuddle with as I deal with my injury.

Lightning was all over Bette, so I think he’ll have a great time. Let’s face it, I already miss him badly. But I’m glad to get this important facet of Lightning’s training further addressed.

Unless you’ve trained a puppy recently, you may not remember much about how you taught her to eliminate outdoors. Some puppies come house-trained or nearly so when you get them. And the training period is rarely very long.

But if you do happen to have a puppy or older dog who is still making mistakes indoors, this article, together with others available online, may help.

I think you need to apply two principles, both of which can be applied in a myriad of ways:

1. The dog needs to be taken outside often enough.
2. When the dog is inside, she must spend every second in locations where she has a natural instinct to maintain control till next trip outdoors.

You could follow a cookie-cutter approach or invent your own, as long as it meets those two criteria.

Though I had had him for several weeks, my puppy Lightning was a challenge at 12 weeks because he did not seem to have come with much understanding of where was OK to go in the first place, and because for our first month together I was almost immobile from a spine injury. At nearly 3 months of age, he was still peeing almost indiscriminately in the house.

So my wife and I worked out a schedule specific to Lightning’s needs, and we’ve now pretty much resolved the issue, with no mistakes in several days. Your situation is no doubt different, but perhaps our example will help you apply the principles to your own solution.

• Lightning is walked three times per meal: once immediately before, once immediately afterwards, and once about 20 minutes afterwards. The operative word here is “immediately”. For Lightning, he eats in his crate and then he finds a treat-filled Kong or other treats in his crate after the second and third walks. Thus going out is a satisfying adventure (he gets to relieve himself), and coming back in is also fun and reinforcing. I should mention that this is a big daily job, since Lightning is on a raw diet where he eats four times per day. That’s twelve walks per day right there.
• In addition to those walls, he gets a walk first thing in the morning and last thing at night, plus every couple of hours during waking hours, if those aren’t covered by the mealtime walks.
• Lightning, like any puppy, needs thorough hydration, but in the early days of house-training, he gets all his water added to his meals. He will have free access to fresh water when he has better control.
• He loves to play with my wife’s Golden, who is two months older. For those play sessions indoors, I have to interrupt him every few minutes to take him outside for a break. I’m not sure why, but that’s one time when Lightning has especially poor control. I guess it’s the excitement.
• So much for frequency. It’s a lot, but it could be worse, and I’m sure some dogs would need even more frequency in the early stages.
• As for safe indoor locations, Lightning has two: his crate, provided he really, definitely has empty tanks when he is in there; and tethered to me on a short leash attached to his flat collar. By short, I mean 30″ or so. That works for us because as it happens, Lightning has never tried to eliminate when he was that close to me. That, by the way, is how we sleep at night. Lightning actually spends little time confined to his crate, since his company means a lot to me while I’m injured.

Obviously all the constraints I’ve described will gradually be broadened, and equally obviously, they are unlikely to apply perfectly to your requirements. But hopefully they provide a sense of the stringent discipline you need to apply to your own behavior as a trainer if you have a particularly difficult case.

[This post contains ideas previously discussed elsewhere as well as other editing annoyances. My apologies; I’ll fix it when I can. But meanwhile,what a day! I would love to tell you about it.]

Circumstances

The PRT program I am developing includes about a score of pre-teething goals, with sequence sometimes crucial and sometimes irrelevant. One of those goals is “Intro to retrieving”. I can’t remember whether it has prerequisites in TRT, but I think any trainer might want to see at least enough to gauge what he’s starting with.

In my case with Lightning, unfortunate events prevented me from trying a single outdoor retrieve with him for more than a month after I picked him up, by which time he was a few days past three months old.

Then, out of the blue, Peter, one of my long-time training assistants, now a full-time college student, contacted me and mentioned that, with winter break, he was available if I were interested. With a few more text exchanges, we had made arrangements and he was here first thing this morning. First he helped me with some business duties, and then he stayed for another few minutes so we could try Lightning out on a small experiment.

Lightning outfitted for training the next day

Discovery training

I call the method we would be using “discovery training”. It shares some principles with a well-known training method called “shaping”, which you can study via an online search if you wish.

As for discovery training, the trainer accomplishes it by creating opportunities for the dog to discover within herself self-reinforcing behaviors which happen to coincide with the trainer’s objectives. Thus the reinforcement comes not from extrinsic rewards, such as food (+R) or electric shocks (-R), nor from the dog’s relationship with the “pack” or “pack leader”, but rather from the dog’s own primary feelings about the actual activities being performed.

By example, a dog who was naturally more comfortable with a symmetrical sit than with an asymmetrical one could learn an improved obedience “front” by being given enough opportunities to practice that she eventually began sitting straighter because it felt better to her. No treats, no relationships.

The method obviously has limited applications, though perhaps is more useful than might first seen apparent. As an example, discovery training is a fine approach to house-training, since the act of eliminating actually provides all the reinforcement the dog really needs, and is just as effective as treats and cheer-leading if used in combination with giving the dog well-timed opportunities to experience elimination in the trainer’s desired target areas.

I can’t say whether discovery training would have much application in other dog sports. I suspect that the answer is yes at least for those sports and activities the dog was actually bred for, such as herding and sled-pulling.

It seems to have broad application in training competition retrievers to dogs bred for the sport, in any case, and we’ll see an example of it in today’s work.

Important note: Years after I wrote this post, I decided that discovery training is not such a good idea after all, and may have contributed to Lightning’s addiction to keep-away games, which plagued several years of his early training. I added a post to this journal at that time to discuss the issue: The demise of discovery training

Expectations

Here, then, were the modest goals I set for my session with Lightning and Peter today, and how I thought we might address particular contingencies.

[Now, by the way, may be as good a time as any to mention that I am not always good at predicting dog training contingencies. For me, a valuable skill is coming up with ways to address particular responses on the fly, when they actually occur, even if I had had no idea in advance the session would happen that way. I think hat means that for my experiences to be useful to others, you may find you need to exercise spontaneity, flexibility, and even creativity at times as you conduct your training, sometimes even varying your program from one dog to another that same day.]

My training plan was more or less as follows:

• I was confined to a chair, so I would demo how to run each trial, provide verbal guidance, and Peter would then execute as many times as necessary. Peter did a great job with that approach.
• Working in our front yard, Lightning was too distracted by the leaves that kept blowing by. At Peter’s suggestion, we moved into a wind-sheltered area of the driveway, which helped a lot.
• Laddie needed to be in the house. He was barking and it made me sad, but you can’t train two dogs at once in most cases.
• Each trial would start with a short toss of a retrieval article, Lightning unrestrained. The universe of possible responses from Lightning would dictate our next step. Peter and I discussed the possibilities at some length. At one extreme, Lightning would ignore the throw. At the other, he would execute a perfect retrieve.
• We would not require a delivery. Lightning could do whatever he wanted to with the article once he was near the handler. I believe strongly in this concept for pre-teething dogs.
• Lightning wore a 15′ check cord. I also strongly believe in pre-teething pup’s practicing retrieves while wearing a check cord.
• I won’t attempt to go over all the hypotheticals. Let’s see what actually happened.

Payoff

We ran about six trials. Here’s what happened:

1. I tossed a 2″ white bumper. Almost perfect retrieve. OMG!
2. Identical toss. Lightning did not even run to it. Hmm, 180 degrees from first trial.
3. I thought he might be finding the bumper unsatisfying, so I took off one of my slippers, and we used that remainder of session. I tossed it, Lightning chased it, picked it up, and started to go crazy shaking it and running around with it. Awesome response. Per instructions, Peter picked up Lightning’s check cord and gently drew him towards us. After a few feet Lightning dropped the slipper.
4. Per instructions, Peter scooped up the slipper and tossed it again, so that it lay inactive for less than a second. Lightning chased it, picked it up, went crazy again, and just held onto it a bit longer when drawn back towards us via the check cord.
5. An almost mathematical progression. This time Lightning carried the slipper almost all the way to us. He was also visibly more directed about that being the natural direction for him to go after his pick-up.
6. Once again, Peter tossed the slipper, and once again, Lightning raced to it and picked it up. But this time, he made an arcing return run right to my hand, which was hanging beside the chair, without dropping the slipper at all. Thrilled, I scooped him into my arms and let Peter know that we had completed our session on a triumphant note.

This session really illustrated the discovery mechanism at work. No treats, no praise, no cheer-leading. Lightning was simply given the opportunity to discover for himself what great fun it is, if you happen to be a retriever, to bring the article back so it will be tossed again a split second later.

Yet he was never given a chance to get bored. We quit while he was hungry for more. I think that’s the right way to do it.

So there you have it. I honestly feel we have the natural foundation for a retrieve. Now all Lightning needs is a few years to refine the details.

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[This post will eventually be moved to a separate website, since it is on a broader topic than just training Lightning. But for now, I hope you don’t mind that I’m stashng it here.]

In early training of retrievers, and I guess all trained dogs, one of the primary training objectives is known as “Intro to obedience.”

“Obedience” in turn typically means three skills for the retriever: Heel, Sit, and Here. Obedience may include other skills in other sports, such as “Down”. Some trainers also train “Stay” as a separate cue, while many consider it implicit in the cues Sit and Down. For example, I don’t train Stay because when I say Sit, I mean “sit till I give a different cue.”

“Here” is the verbal recall cue used for retrievers, with a come-in whistle as a synonym. Other sports and activities use other cues, such as the dog’s name, or “Come”, or other kinds of whistles.

All of the obedience cues are of fundamental importance for the field retriever and deserve discussion, but recall (Here) is in a class of its own. So before even addressing how to train it, I thought I’d outline why it’s so important in this sport. Recall is used for all of the following:

• Complete the retrieve —
• Recall from trouble, during competition or everyday life —
• Handling on blind — [whistle version, often in combination with angle direction]
• Handling on mark —
• Foundation for steadiness as a controlled break —
• Time to depart the scene —
• Abort the retrieve —

[In a future version of this article, perhaps I’ll fill in more detail on items above.]

All of that, just from one cue!

But a reliable recall is difficult to achieve. The proof is in how often even advanced retrievers refuse the command at training days and during competitions, and in how many systems, including full-blown courses, designed to produce a rock solid recall are published.

But as the outline above illustrates, the benefits are both plentiful and vital. I would go so far as to say that a retriever’s pre-teething program that accomplished nothing but a reliable, well-proofed recall from field-retriever distances would reasonably be considered a rousing success, even if none of the many other early training goals had been gotton to.

Traditional trainers often use an ecollar to strengthen the recall, and in some cases even to train it. Though not necessarily a perfect recall, that method can humanely produce a high quality recall in a matter of hours.

For that reason, it is sometimes difficult for traditional trainers to understand why a positive-trained dog doesn’t always come when called. This can cause conflict at training days, so if you are using a PRT approach, I’d urge you to brace yourself. It may take you many months of hard work to instill the recallability that will be expected of your dog, no matter how your dog excels in other facets of the sport.

In future posts, we’ll talk about how to go about it. Oh yes, it can be done.