More Urban gun dog training

Geez. I can't believe it's been so long since I've written in my blog. My mom has just been so busy with work and I've been super busy playing and doing urban gun dog training with my hoomans that I forget to write in here and read about all my friends' adventures. Thankfully my mom has a four day weekend coming up so maybe we can use that time to rectify this problem.

Anyway here's a quick update with my training progress. Since my last post my mom has gotten me a retrieving dummy, which I LOVE! Unfortunately, I only get to play with it when we're training, but I think that's one of the reason why I love it so much. There's a lot of rules I have to follow when I play with my dummy, like sitting and being steady when it's thrown, heeling off leash, and retrieving it to hand, but that's all part of the fun.



So far I'm really good at memory/marked retrieves and we're now moving on to blind retrieves, which is why my mom has introduced me to whistle training. I'm really good at taking directions from hand signals, but now my mom is training me with a whistle so we can both learn better control over a greater distance. So far I've aced my recall and hup (sit) commands over a great distance and here is a quick video showing my progress while playing at one of our beaches.

My mom and dad never really got the chance to work on my recall when we lived in the Azores since there weren't many safe places to train, but in Annapolis there are many safe and wide open areas. Now we have no excuse to not work on perfecting my recall and we've been having a great time working on it. Just about a week ago my training proved its worth when I took off after a squirrel in our driveway and immediately came back to the whistle instead of continuing the chase into our neighbors yard. And a few days ago I found a pile of fish scales and decomposing fish parts that some fishermen left on the banks of the river and though it smelled wonderful and I was already kneeling to roll around in it, once I heard my mom blow the whistle I knew I had to come back right away.

Smelling like decomposing fish or catching that squirrel would have been awesome, but seeing how proud my mom and dad are when I come running back to them always makes my day!