Friday, April 17, 2009
Advanced Training Tip - Transitional Training/Preseason Tune-ups
During the off season, it is very important to keep your hunting partner tuned up. Remember, it is a long time between the end of the hunting season and the beginning of the next. If you are not careful, your dog will not only get physically out of shape, but he will lose his sharp crisp skills he had at the end of the past season. This is usually brought about by lying around the house eating cupcakes and watching Dr Phil all day while you are at work.
Take an Olympic Athlete for example, they have to train day in and day out for years in order to prepare for the next Olympic Games. Then, in order to keep that keen edge, they have to continue training for the next Olympics. For Athletes, canine and human alike, regular training is the only way to stay in shape and to remain sharp and focused.
So we spend the summer perfecting our handling skills on blind retrieves on land and water. We do some work on triples, diversions or other necessary skills of a finished gundog. The dog, while enjoying the retrieving and workouts, knows the difference between hunting and training. Even so, we still must work the dogs regularly to keep them fit and focused. However, even with all this work, it still does not match the excitement of a live hunt. That is where a little transitional training comes in.
Where we fail to prepare the dog each year is what we call the transitional phase. Just like with young dogs in training, leading up to the completion of their training we go through a transition phase. This phase puts it all together for the dog, it shows them that everything they learned afield using bumpers and dead birds, how it is applied in a real world hunting scenario. So how do you go about doing this transitional phase?
One day while working at Wildrose Kennels, one of the other trainers, Jeremy Criscoe and I started discussing this very topic of how to go about making a more realistic hunting scenario for the dogs in the transitional phase of training. That was when the idea came to me. I own an Otter Outdoors Stealth 1200 duck boat that I kept out at
Wildrose for training. I also owned several Innotek remote control bird launchers also.
Some call these box launchers. I asked Jeremy, “what about loading the launchers with pigeons and placing them in my boat then connecting a long rope to the boat and shoving it out into the pond or flooded timber. Doing this before we get the dogs out, makes it so they are unaware of what is about to happen and it really gets them on an adrenaline high when the birds start flying.
So Jeremy and I got everything together and setup, then we got our dogs. All the kennel hands came to see what we were up to. When the birds started flying and we started shooting, the dogs were really surprised and excited. As it turned out, this was more like any duck hunt than anything we had done before. It was situations in training like this that truly prepares a dog for the excitement of that first hunt each year, or their first hunt ever.
This turned out so well, that we even used it with the owners so they could have the opportunity of handling the dog in a live fire/live bird situation. Handling a dog with dead birds and bumpers and shooting blank loads is one thing, but in a live situation, it is totally different. So this became an invaluable experience for them as well.
Here is a video from DUTV that was filmed at Wildrose doing this very thing, and yes, that is my boat and my launchers in the video. Autographs later please.
Take an Olympic Athlete for example, they have to train day in and day out for years in order to prepare for the next Olympic Games. Then, in order to keep that keen edge, they have to continue training for the next Olympics. For Athletes, canine and human alike, regular training is the only way to stay in shape and to remain sharp and focused.
So we spend the summer perfecting our handling skills on blind retrieves on land and water. We do some work on triples, diversions or other necessary skills of a finished gundog. The dog, while enjoying the retrieving and workouts, knows the difference between hunting and training. Even so, we still must work the dogs regularly to keep them fit and focused. However, even with all this work, it still does not match the excitement of a live hunt. That is where a little transitional training comes in.
Where we fail to prepare the dog each year is what we call the transitional phase. Just like with young dogs in training, leading up to the completion of their training we go through a transition phase. This phase puts it all together for the dog, it shows them that everything they learned afield using bumpers and dead birds, how it is applied in a real world hunting scenario. So how do you go about doing this transitional phase?
One day while working at Wildrose Kennels, one of the other trainers, Jeremy Criscoe and I started discussing this very topic of how to go about making a more realistic hunting scenario for the dogs in the transitional phase of training. That was when the idea came to me. I own an Otter Outdoors Stealth 1200 duck boat that I kept out at
Wildrose for training. I also owned several Innotek remote control bird launchers also. Some call these box launchers. I asked Jeremy, “what about loading the launchers with pigeons and placing them in my boat then connecting a long rope to the boat and shoving it out into the pond or flooded timber. Doing this before we get the dogs out, makes it so they are unaware of what is about to happen and it really gets them on an adrenaline high when the birds start flying.So Jeremy and I got everything together and setup, then we got our dogs. All the kennel hands came to see what we were up to. When the birds started flying and we started shooting, the dogs were really surprised and excited. As it turned out, this was more like any duck hunt than anything we had done before. It was situations in training like this that truly prepares a dog for the excitement of that first hunt each year, or their first hunt ever.
This turned out so well, that we even used it with the owners so they could have the opportunity of handling the dog in a live fire/live bird situation. Handling a dog with dead birds and bumpers and shooting blank loads is one thing, but in a live situation, it is totally different. So this became an invaluable experience for them as well.
Here is a video from DUTV that was filmed at Wildrose doing this very thing, and yes, that is my boat and my launchers in the video. Autographs later please.
# posted by Clay Black @ 12:48 PM 
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