Sometimes Lightning drops a bumper a few feet in front of me on his return during pile work, instead of holding it as he comes around to heel and awaits me taking it from him.

I can use a Fetch cue to get him to pick it up, and that’s what I better do in a competition, since we’ll be disqualified if I touch the bird on the ground.

But since our Fetch cue is trained with positive reinforcement rather than an ear pinch or collar nick, Lightning has no reason to avoid it, so i guess that’s the reason the dropping behavior doesn’t diminish once it starts happening in a session.

A similar thing happens with some dogs on water retrieves, where they drop the article and shake off just as they come out of the water. For some reason Lightning doesn’t do that, but both of my Goldens tended to when they were learning water retrieves, possibly because of their longer, heavier coats.

Years ago I found a counterintuitive yet effective solution to drops coming out of the water: pick the bumper up and toss it back in the water. Instinctively I would have thought that would actually reinforce dropping the article, since my dogs love open water retrieves, but for some reason they don’t like having to turn around and jump back in the water if they haven’t finished the previous retrieve.

It turns out the same approach works with Lightning on pile work. If he drops the bumper in front of me, I quickly pick it up and use a low, unexciting throw to toss it back in the direction he came from. Lightning always delivers it correctly the second time, and the drops quickly diminished when I started doing that.

You might remember that when Lightning completes his delivery, I often fire a shot from my blank pistol and throw the bumper in a new direction to add excitement to the pile work drill. Lightning seems to really looks forward to those gunfire retrieves, so he quickly learned to eliminate the delay that occurs when he drops the bumper coming back from the pile and I toss it back out. I’m not sure why the delay didn’t cause the drops to diminish when I used a Fetch cue, but for some reason it didn’t.

Picking up and tossing a dropped article runs so counter to how I’d expect it to work, on land ot water returns, that I thought I’d devote a post to just to that topic.