Lightning has made great progress on his recall. I can consistently call him from distance, and this morning at the vet, I had a chance to let him play with another dog, and then call him back to me while in the middle of playing. I’ll use the Walking Recall well into the future to continue to strengthen his recall, always looking for good challenges, but meanwhile I feel we’re ready to go on with PRT Stage 2 yard work, corresponding to TRT Basics yard work.

To see where we are, we’ve viewed the first few segments of Disc 2 of the TRT video. What we saw were the following steps for a traditionally trained retriever at this point:

1. Simple casting with indirect pressure
2. Collar fetch
3. Pile work

It’s always a privilege to have the chance to watch Mike Lardy training, but for the PRT program, we have no use for indirect pressure or the other force-based concepts associated with the first two of those steps. At the same time, we do want our positive-trained dog to be as proficient at performing the behaviors as one being trained with that approach. Therefore, now we’ll spend a few yards work sessions returning to simple casting, and then returning even further to the Walking Fetch, to use the same PRT methods we used previously to further polish those skills. The TRT video gives us a performance standard to aim for at this point in our progression.

In parallel, in our field work we’ll continue primarily with singles off multiple guns, with occasional retired guns and with occasional doubles. The weather is also allowing us to run non-cheating singles when we’re able to get to a training property. These we mostly LWL retrieves with lengthening land and water segments, with only occasional open water retrieves. I also like to run Lightning on re-entry singles, that is, LWLWL retrieves, again staying clear of cheating situations. I want Lightning to always run straight lines, on land and water.

As for yard work, once Lightning is performing simple casting and the Walking Fetch at the same level of fluency and enthusiasm as the dogs in the current section of the TRT video, we’ll be ready to start pile work.