CockersOnline Forum
Cocker Activities => Working => Topic started by: JohnW on April 24, 2009, 05:48:22 PM
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Well I have been out with Raven today for his daily 20 minute training session with the whistle and dummies, I normally take him with none of my others dogs as I don't want him to be distracted, well today I decided to take his mother Willow along as willow is really calm and relaxed and walks to heal and will not leave my side when out walking. Well I took the 2 of them to the local Fell not long from my house and started the tasks we have both been given from the gamepkeeper who is training US, I only use 2 different pips while training 1 short pip for to seek/hunt the dummy and one long pip for raven to sit and look at me which he has picked up no problem as with hand signals also, he seems to be the natural little hunter.
Well the strangest thing happened , Willow started to react to the commands and whitle pips too, without me doing any kind of training with her, she was kind of trained when she was youngster before I bought her but to be honest I have never persued any training with her apart from the sit and heal when told to which she was always good at, And I never asked how far her training went. Although she wouldnt actually retreive the dummies, she did find them and before raven too, Almost commical as she was finding them for him to bring them back to me. I am kind of buzzing now as I had no idea she would even be interested, I know what some may be thinking and yeh I am a little ambarrased by this lack of my own foresight too,I guess my own dog has humbled me in a really nice way, But I am actually buzzing that a dog who is now 5 1/2 seems to remember her old training or at least I assume so. :D
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That's a lovely story!
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Aw :luv: :luv: Sounds like you may be taking two of them to training ;)
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That is really good - could it be like humans, once taught to ride a bike or swim, no matter how long the time between episodes - it is something we do not forget :D
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What a great surprise! I bet you were beaming from ear to ear :D
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Impressive.
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John what a wonderful surprise! :D
I think that dogs do have good memories - for example I taught Moss to "play dead" in a ten minute session at the end of the Summer hols (an exercise of amusement for my little cousins who said that dogs who could play dead were cool :shades: ) So he learned the words "play dead" and a hand signal for it.
Then just over Easter when my cousins saw Moss again they asked whether he could still play dead. and I thought ooooops, because I hadn't repeated the exercise with him since that one time during the summer hols ph34r
But I decided to be cool :shades: and said "of course he can still play dead, Mossy is a very clever little chap ::) " and then I called Moss over (said a little prayer to myself :angel: :lol: ) and asked him to "play dead".
I simply couldn't believe it when he quickly lay down with his legs held up in the air in the dead dog pose :o :luv: (I had been busily making up plausible excuses in my head as to why Moss wasn't doing it properly, e.g: he's too excited to see you all again etc... ph34r ) But instead I was able to very smugly say "I told you he could still do it, he's not stupid you know!" to my cousins :P :lol2: (Obviously Moss got an awful lot of treats that afternoon for being such a clever boy :-* )
I think that if Willow is keen to pick up her old gun dog training then I'd go for it. Just be very steady and kind with her, because as you have said previously - you're not sure how friendly her first gamekeeper home was to her, so she may have some bad memories about certain aspects of the training which you will need to convince her are not going to be enforced in the same nasty way that she might remember etc... :-*
Good luck to Willow :luv:
Mary xxx
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Oh John thats lovely - like surprises like that. It always amazes me how much Roly will copy Misha. Misha has been doing agility for a few months and we practice our weaves in the back garden. Decided to give Roly a go the other day, and he picked it up within minutes. He did exactly the same thing with retrieving. Think the sausages were a bit of an incentive though.
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Thats a brilliant shock!
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That is amazing. You must be really proud of her.
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Fantastic, they never fail to surprise do they :D
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thats really nice. a wonderful shock indeed!