How To Make Your Retriever Even Better This Hunting Season.

Hunting season is a time that we all look forward to! It's a time where we travel and invest countless hours into creating a successful hunt. It's also a time where your retriever's training can either falter or advance further than ever before.

Many times retriever owners stop training during hunting season and only focus on the hunt. This results in a dog that is rough around the edges after the hunting season. But...

If you handle it right, you can come out on the other side of the hunting season better off than when you started. Let's talk about how to get the most out of training during the hunting season.

First things first, keep training when you're not hunting. The worst thing you can do is stop training just because it's hunting season. If you do this, your dog is sure to pick up some bad habits from the hunting season.

Second, be sure to take notes on what your dog does and how they handle the hunt. Use your phone, a note pad, or anything you can get your hands on. Maybe they refused one of your whistle stops, or perhaps they took the wrong hand signal. These are the perfect things to take note of.

Asking questions and taking notes will allow you to craft a game plan that will teach your dog what they need to know or reinforce what they already knew.

After your done hunting for the week, review your notes. Think about things like: "Did my dog remain steady, or did my dog struggle with steadiness?" "Did my dog obey all my hand signals?"  

Finally, once you know what your dog needs to work on, create a game plan that will help them succeed. Train on it until the next hunt and see if it improves any. If it doesn't improve, then regroup and try another plan. If it does improve, take notes on the next hunt and make your dog even better. 

Here's an example of what it could look like:

Let's say I go out hunting for the weekend, and I take my dog Beretta with me. Beretta crushed the marks, but when it came to lining, he struggled. He kept wanting to veer off the line, and this caused me to end up handling him more than I would like. He also broke a couple of times. He seemed to have a lot of excitement from the hunt, and now I realized I haven't worked on steadiness enough with him.

My notes would go something like this: 

"Struggled with lining and steadiness, but he crushed the marks and handled well when I needed to handle him." "Need to work on lining from 80-100 yards and need to work on steadiness."

Ok, so now I go home, and when I get all settled back in, I take a minute to review my notes. Once I do that, I pull out my handy Lesson Planner and start working on a game plan. This is what my lesson planner would look like for the week:

I would follow my game plan over the next week, and then when I go hunting again, I would take notes and see how Beretta improved. If he improved, I would find anything else that he could improve on, but if he didn't, I would regroup and try another game plan or keep focusing on the current game plan.

If you do this throughout the hunting season, you and your retriever will finish the hunting season off strong and set yourself up for an excellent spring training. Instead of playing catch up during the spring, you will be advancing forwards like a well-oiled machine. In fact, if you will apply these simple steps, you will be setting your next hunting season up the be the best it's ever been.

I hope you enjoy this!

BuildFromHere,

Joshua Parvin 

P.S. Learn more about the Complete Gundog Academy Here.