In our region, we’ve had a prolonged stretch of summer weather that has given Lightning and me an opportunity to utilize the Three Toy Game, which I wrote about previously, nearly every day for months on end, gradually addressing Lightning’s crippling keep-away tendencies. Yesterday was one of the high points so far on that trajectory.

We trained for nearly an hour, using no bumpers, but instead just a dokken and two small, thawing birds. I started the session by giving Lightning ample time to run around uncontrolled with the dokken, tossing him a slice of hot dog each time he brought the dokken to me. Combating the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which I also discussed in another article in this journal, I would then immediately return the dokken to him with the verbal cue, a cheerful Go Play.

Once I felt he was losing enthusiasm for playing by himself, I brought out one of the birds from our cooler and tried a small, simple double. After calling Lightning to heel and cueing Sit, I tossed the dokken about thirty yards and the bird just a few feet away from him, calling Hey Hey Hey with each throw. When I sent Lightning on his name to the bird, he ran to it, picked it up, and brought it back to me, with not the slightest trace of seeming to grapple with the temptation to play keep-away. Then I sent him for the dokken and again he brought it straight back, despite the fact that only a few moments later he’d been playing keep-away with it.

That was an encouraging start to what turned out to be a long, unbroken string of increasingly difficult doubles and then triples, adding a second bird to the game. Besides increasing the distance of the poorman marks significantly, I also began to tossing the birds into cover, necessitating a delay in the retrieve as Lightning would have to carry out a search. All of this was intended to test and strengthen his ability to resist switching into keep-away mode, since stress and frustration often seem to be precursors of those switches. But it never happened. Lightning did not attempt a keep-away game a single time once we started running our marks.

I’m telling this story not primarily because it contains any important training revelations, but as a memorial of one day, at least, when training Lightning was completely free of the keep-away issue that has plagued so much of our training these last few years.

I’m under no delusion that we won’t have more difficulties with keep-away in future sessions, especially if water retrieves and wet birds are involved. But yesterday’s session was a welcome reprieve.