I haven’t asked Lightning to learn anything new the last few days. Instead we’re continuing to practice and strengthen skills we’ve already been working on:

• The highlight of most days is practice with gunner-thrown marks using thawed ducks and gunfire. Each session begins with a bumper retrieve, while  a duck lies elsewhere on the field upwind. Each day, the duck is closer to the gunner than before. Once Lightning retrieves the bumper, the gunner runs to pick up the duck to throw as reinforcement for the bumper retrieve, and from then on, all marks that session are with the duck. Eventually, Lightning will be able to retrieve a thrown bumper even with a duck at the gunner’s feet and with duck scent in the vicinity of where we’re working. That’s what we’re working toward.
• The first few days Lightning retrieved a duck, he tended to drag it by a wing. Yesterday, the duck wasn’t quite thawed, though the outside feathers were soft. Training with the wings still frozen to the body turned out to be an advantage, because Lightning carried the bird by holding its whole body in his mouth as I would like him to. I thought it might be more of a problem to solve, but Lightning seens to have worked it out himself with the help of partially frozen birds.
• Yesterday’s training had more distraction than I would have preferred, two girls practicing soccer on an adjacent field despite the sub-freezing temps. Lightning frequently looked at them, both when waiting for a throw at the line and when he arrived at the bird after running out to it, but he stuck to his work, so we didn’t have to move to a different location.
• Lightning’s retrieves themselves were good. He ran straight to each mark, even when I had the bird thrown into a shallow depression so that he couldn’t see it till he got close.
• Perhaps the most significant element of Lightning’s performance for me is that for some time now, Lightning has been running directly back to the handler on his returns, with no attempts at keep-away. I attribute this to the check cord, which makes any attempt at keep-away futile, to the fact that the handler doesn’t force Lightning to give up the bird but let’s him drop it whenever he’s ready to, and perhaps to natural breed or individual tendencies that have nothing to do with our training. Whatever the reasons, that facet of the retrieve was a major challenge with Lumi and Laddie literally for years, so having found an approach that lets us avoid those pitfalls, at least so far, is for me a major revelation.
• I don’t know how many retrieves other puppies at Lightning’s stage run per session, but I’ve been keeping our sessions short. Yesterday, for example, Lightning retrieved the bumper at 40y once and the duck, working out to 80y, about eight times. I then called the session off while his performance was at a peak. We’ve had good results with short sessions.
• On a personal note, I was having some back and leg pain yesterday. Fearng a relapse of my spinal injury, I brought along two assistants and guided them via radio while I watched from the vehicle. It makes me a bit sad to have other people running Lightning, but I think they do a good job when we take this approach, and as I’ve mentioned before, I think it may help Lightning to develop a clearer concept of the retrieve pattern than if he always had the same handler.
• In other facets of Lightning’s development, I rarely use a lead any more, though he continues wearing a check cord for retrieving. In the house and in the yard, he and Laddie both stay close to me without the need for leashes, a benefit I think of having kept them close to me on tether in their early weeks, so that staying close became natural for them.
• Although I still watch Laddie closely, he and Lightning are now able to rough house together. Lightning also gets play sessions in the kitchen with Ryley most days. Ryley is two months older and about twice as big as Lightning now, but they both engage excitedly in the sessions.
• Lightning seems to have a fairly clear understanding of what I mean when I guide him in relatively subtle ways, such as with a sweep of my hand thru a gate or a soft call of “c’mon” as I head upstairs. Thus our communication had gradually strengthened with nearly continuous training throughout the day.
• I’m also using sweeping hand gestures to practice Lightning coming to heel on both sides each day. He’s learned to turn in place and not go around behind me, since I would not want him going behind me at the line. So far we’ve only practiced coming to heel in the house. He’s developed an automatic sit as he comes into position and to respond to a verbal Heel cue with a hand gesture to indicate which side, so he’s made good progress. I don’t feel much urgency for him learning the Heel cue at this stage. Eventually his Heel will be combined with other skills to become Lightning’s delivery, but I think that’s a couple of months away, when he’s done teething and ready to learn Out, Hold, and Fetxh. By then, he’ll have been practicing Heel for months.
• On other matters, I no longer need to cut up his raw food into bite-sized pieces. He eats chicken drumsticks straight from the freezer, but I thaw chunks of ground meat for him at room temperature for an hour or two. In theory he gets three meals a day, but it often works out to more like six meals, since he often stops eating after he’s eaten about half his food. I then open his crate, where he eats his meals, and he comes out and then goes back in to finish the meal sometime later. He’s extremely lean and I worry when he won’t eat, but I guess that’s natural for him. Laddie was the same way in his early years. Other retrievers we’ve had were much more food motivated and always eager for food.
• In all the time I’ve had Lightning, he’s never pooped in the house, and he rarely pees inside, either, though it still sometimes happens when he gets excited.
• Since I know that people are sometimes concerned about puppy biting, I thought I’d mention that I followed my friend Jody’s advice not to worry about it, and in fact to offer my hands and fingers to Lightning for biting in those early days, along with countless dog toys. Yes, the biting was a bit painful, but he quit doing it on his own within a few weeks. No training to deal with it was needed. He still chews on toys, shoes, etc. and play bites when wrestling with other dogs, but he stopped chewing on people early on.
• Finally, I thought I’d mention that I do not take Lightning for walks in our neighborhood, and never let Laddie or him cross our property boundaries when they are outside. So even though we do not have a fenced yard, Lightning has never attempted to wander off. That would be unlikely anyway since he tends to stay close to Laddie and me, but I want him to have a sense of the property boundaries as an additional precaution. He gets plenty of time off the property since we go out to train most days along with other adventures, but we always go in a vehicle.

I’ve been wanting to cover some of those topics to make this journal more complete, but now they’re out of the way. I probably won’t mention some of them again.