With the warm weather — it’s been in the 90s lately — I’ve been able to take Lightning swimming most days. It’s not practical for me to drive a three-hour roundtrip to a technical pond very often, but we do have a reservoir and a neighborhood pond fairly close to home.

Lightning’s keep-away tendencies are worst around water, while he’s gotten fairly reliable on land retrieves. On water, however, he drives out full-bore to the bumper but it’s only a random chance whether he’ll bring it back to the thrower (me) on shore or take it for a romp up and down the shoreline completely immune to any cue. Sadly, the romp can go on for a long time.

That said, Lightning is getting better! It’s so much more fun for me when he brings the article back to me than having to watch him racing back and forth. I guess he dies it to tease me though I won’t pretend to know for sure what his motivation is.

Anyway, today he was reliable enough that I could run bulldogs with him. That is, as he’s on his return with one article, another gets thrown out, typically somewhere fairly tempting for him to divert to. The objective is for him not to divert, but rather complete the first return, then spin around and await being sent to the bulldog article. (I have no clue why it’s called a “bulldog”, by the way.)

Bulldogs are a challenge, and challenges are a two-edged sword with Lightning. On the one hand, succeeding at a challenge seems to be clearly reinforcing fit him. On the other hand, a challenge can also be stressful, and for Lightning, stress leads to the dreaded keep-away game.

So it was a good sign of progress that Lightning could perform bulldogs on water. It may even have been so much fun that it was edging out keep-away as a preferred activity. Wouldn’t that be nice?

After swimming, I usually run Lightning on big retrieves on land before returning to the car, which helps build strength and endurance, and also helps dry him. Today, I found that he could also do bulldogs on land. Not surprising, really, all things considered, but a happy discovery nonetheless.

As for practical value in competition, as far as I know they don’t run bulldogs in field trials, and I never saw one in a Junior or Senior Hunt Test. But we did get them occasionally in Master tests, so it does have some practical value there. It may also be useful in some hunting situations, I don’t know.

As a training drill, I can’t pin down the specific mechanism, but instinctively it feels like running bulldogs can actually strengthen the dog’s drive to return with both articles. So besides helping the dog ever more deeply understand the true nature of a retrieve, this particular drill may also be a stepping stone to putting the keep-away game behind us.

O let it be! :0)