De-cheating is the retriever training term for teaching a dog to take a straight line toward a mark rather than detouring around an obstacle.

Though I’m not a hunter, my understanding is that running around an obstacle such as a pond is actually often advantageous in a hunting situation, since it allows the dog to pick up the game faster.

But judges for field trials often challenge the dog’s training by setting up situations where, if the dog runs around an obstacle, the dog will have difficulty navigating back on line to the fall and end up with a lower score or even getting disqualified.

The primary means for de-cheating is handling: If the dog begins to cheat during a training session, you as the handler blow a sit whistle and then handle the dog back onto the correct line. Over time, the dog becomes less likely to cheat as he/she learns it won’t work, and that then carries into competition. Sometimes you also use some sort of additional correction during training so the dog will be even less inclined to cheat in similar situations in the future, especially in competition. You don’t want to handle on a mark in competition, of course. You want the dog to take the obstacle automatically, without being handled.

But a dog like Lightning, in PRT Stage 2, equivalent to TRT Basics, has not yet learned the handling skills needed for de-cheating in that way. He’s learning those skills in the Stage 2 yard progression, and we’ll begin applying them to de-cheating in PRT Stage 3, what TRT calls ”Transition”.

But TRT does include a type of de-cheating in Basics that we’ll also include in PRT Stage 2. It’s called conventional de-cheating and can only be used for short distances, since it relies on the dog wearing a line. The line can’t be too long or it will becomes too heavy and awkward. But it is a way to introduce the dog to de-cheating. Mike covers it in the TRM program.

As for our PRT program, as of this morning Lightning had experience with every element of the Stage 2 field progression except conventional de-cheating. To address that omission, I brought Lightning and Laddie, together with one assistant, Liza, to our closest training property with water. For a line, we used his 15′ check cord.

However, it didn’t go as I expected. When Lightning first started swimming, he did indeed look for opportunities to cheat on water marks, and I guess the line would have helped. But today, I set up six different marks with cheating water entries, with both Liza and me handling at different times. Lightning only attempted to cheat on one of them. For that one, he tried twice to run the bank, and both times I held onto his line and gently reeled him back to me, then sent him again. The third time he took a good line.

That’s the way conventional de-cheating is supposed to work, so I’m glad to have it out of the way. But it was good to see Lightning exhibiting a natural ”honesty”, as trainers call it, on the other five marks, so Liza or I as handler could just let him complete the retrieve without using the line.

By the way, in addition to the de-cheating marks, I also set up a couple of water marks with other useful training lessons for Lightning. One was in what’s called a stick pond, which is the term for an area that used to have trees growing but has now been flooded for water training. The dead trees provide obstacles both under the surface and protruding up from the water. Some dogs have difficulty swimming in stick ponds so it’s good to give the dog some experience with them. As it turns out, Lightning had no difficulty with these stick ponds.

Another training objective we worked on was a re-entry. In this case, Lightning had to swim to an island, run across it, and then swim across a second channel to get to the mark. Like many dogs inexperienced with such marks, he hunted short on the island for a little while before finally jumping back into the water and swimming to the mark. With experience, he’ll learn to run right over the intermediate land and leap straight into the next water segment.

In addition to that work, Lightning also got in a couple of long swims on water singles. Laddie also did some good water work, suited of course to an advanced retriever: long marks with cheat-y re-entries. Liza handled Laddie on one of those with me throwing, instead of the other way around. Over all, I felt it was a good session for all of us.