Since Lightning is not yet being trained to handle, he has no need for a whistle Sit cue, and we can only use a verbal Sit in most situations outside of field training. Whistles don’t go well in our house or in most public settings.

But the whistle Sit will play a vital role in approximately half of the retrieves Lightning will someday run in competition, namely the land and water  blinds, as well as occasional other use. So before running Laddie and Lightning on retrieves in yesterday’s session, I took a few minutes to train a whistle Sit to Lightning.

I had planned to use a mechanism called anticipatory response as the basis for transferring Lightning’s understanding of a verbal Sit to an alternate cue, a single whistle tweet, for the same behavior. To use that method, you give the new cue, and when the subject doesn’t respond, you give the known cue and reinforce when the subject responds. After s few trials, the subject begins to anticipate the known cue and responds to the earlier cue in order to receive the reinforcement sooner. Within anther trial or two, it’s no longer necessary to prompt with the older cue, and you can just practice with and reinforce responses to the new cue

So I had brought along sliced ham to use for reinforcement, but it turned out I didn’t need to prompt with a verbal Sit more than once or twice. Lightning seemed to have a natural Sit response to the single tweet, so all I needed to do was give him a bit of ham each time he responded correctly.

I didn’t want Lightning to learn the incorrect concept that he should always come in front of me to sit, so as soon as he was responding to the whistle, I moved about and used hand gestures to guide Lightning so that we could practice a wide variety of othec contexts for him to hear the whistle and respond, such as beside me at heel or at distance from me, trusting me to rush to him with his treat when he responded correctly.

Later I tried a sit whistle while Lightning was waiting for a mark to be thrown during retrieval practice, and he instantly sat without taking his eye off the gunner. I was pleased. That’s the kind of reflexive response I was aiming for. From now on, we’ll continue to practice and reinforce Lightning’s whistle Sit so it will already be available when we begin training handling in the next phase of our program.