TRAINING.
TEACHING PUPPY TO SIT: This is easily done by simply placing one hand under your puppy’s chin while pushing down firmly on its rear end and saying SIT. Your pup will quickly pick this up and, of course, you reward it with a treat each time it successfully completes this task. Repeat it often until your pup will do it without hesitation, remembering to incorporate a hand signal. A simple hand signal raised in the stop action is perfect and eventually that hand signal will be all that is required to have it plant its butt firmly on the ground.
When pup has the SIT under control it is time to introduce the STAY command. Instruct pup to SIT and when it is sitting raise your hand in the STOP action, tell pup to stay then move away a short distance. If pup starts to follow you raise your hand in the STOP sign and tell pup to stay. Repeat this until pup has it down pat, it shouldn’t take long. This is a very important step as eventually when finally out hunting you will find it necessary to have your dog to sit and stay while you are doing something. I incorporate this method while hunting ducks over dams with Missy. When l am sneaking up to a dam wall after ducks l can get Missy to sit and stay about 20 meters from the dam while l continue on by myself. Missy will wait until l finish firing then come forward to retrieve any ducks l have taken, on command of course.
Teaching a pup to come to its name is pretty straight forward, call pup by name and say COME and incorporate the hand movement by tapping your leg as you call the pup, in time the leg pat will be all you need. In the beginning of this stage of the puppy’s training it is probably best to have the pup on a training cord. If pup doesn’t respond to his name being called pull it towards you and then repeat the process.
GUN-SHY: Any time l hear a hunter bemoaning he has a gun-shy dog l immediately think to myself, it’s probably not the dogs fault, you have done something wrong, like taking your pup out hunting far too young and firing a shotgun too close to it. Dogs have very acute hearing and a shotgun being fired over the pup’s head would be frightening. I overcome this by firing a cap gun, far enough away from the pup so as not to frighten it, every time l feed it. Your pup will eventually associate the noise with what it loves best, his tucker. I bought my cap gun from a toy shop but if you can’t acquire one, any sort of noise will do as long as it isn’t too loud.
A more professional approach is to enlist a friend and go out into the field and while you and the dog are looking about have your friend fire a gun , preferably a 410, some distance from you and on hearing the gun discharge your dog will look in the direction of the gunshot. Give it a pat and words of praise and a treat. Remember repetition is the key to success and keep the lessons short so as not to bore your dog, 10 to 15 minutes a lesson is ample.
