My name is Lindsay Ridgeway. I became interested in dog training in 2003 when I got Lumi, my first Golden, and I became interested in training for retriever competition in 2007, the same year I also got Laddie, my second Golden. Lumi eventually earned her JH and SH in AKC field competition, her WC and WCX in GRCA field events, and her CGC and TDI in non-field titles. Laddie has gone even further in field competition, earning his AKC Master Hunter and six JAMs in AKC Field Trial Qualifying stakes, plus two Reserve JAMs and a Third Place in a 33-dog stake, so far. Laddie and I are continuing his career in field trials as I’ve also begun to work with Sasha, a friend’s mixed breed dog, and now my new puppy, Lightning.
Since a key objective in training my own dogs these last eight years was to develop positive methods for training competition retrievers, I maintain a number of websites to record various perspectives on my training efforts.
This website is dedicated to the story of Lightning, registered as Shoreline’s Blue Lightning, a black male Labrador Retriever. Lightning was born on September 6, 2015. I brought him home to Gaithersburg, Maryland, in October 2015, with plans to train and run him in AKC retriever field trails.
For all my dogs, we work without the use of physical aversives: no electronic collar (ecollar), no heeling stick (crop), no Force Fetch, no ear or toe pinches, no choke collar, no pinch (prong) collar, no cattle prod. Yet despite foregoing the commonly used tools of the traditional field trainer, our goal has been for my dogs to learn to run land and water marks, as well as land and water blinds, at the highest level of performance we can attain together.
This journal tells the story of training a particular dog, and any training program requires modifications for individual dogs. Nonetheless, if you have a retriever you’d like to train for field competition without the use of physical aversives, I hope you’ll find the program I’ve developed to train Lightning, which I call the Positive Retriever Training (PRT) program, useful in your own training.
You can contact me at: LDRidgeway at gmail dot com
Lightning's Journal 
If one were to want to go to the beginning of the Lightning’s Journal and read from the beginning forward, how would one navigate to the first post?
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Great question. It would be nice if WordPress offered a link to the beginning. The closest they have is an archive with a link to November 2015, the blog’s first month, but then you’d need to scroll to the bottom.
In any case, here’s a link to the first post:
https://lightningsjournal.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/selecting-a-retriever-puppy/
I guess it goes without saying that this is a work in progress. It needs a lot of editing, and I suspect some of the early posts, when my health was a serious issue, may be irrelevant to the topic of training a retriever, though as time went by I became more disciplined about staying to that topic.
Please bear in mind also that PRT, the program I’m developing, is modeled on Mike Lardy’s TRT. For the first few months, that mostly means the TRT Flow Chart, which is available free online. I think it might be difficult to follow my program without having Mike’s material to view at the same time.
Thanks so much for your interest in the journal and your excellent question.
Lindsay
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Teaching fetch, hold, give with positive training.
Chip
chipW@humphreysinsurance.com
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