DOUBLE DRILL

The following is a good drill to use for teaching dogs double concepts while increasing the degree of complexity.  When starting, especially with young dogs, the distance should be reasonable and if possible, on a field with low cover.  Once the dogs understand the concept, you can vary the distance and introduce a variety of terrain.  If it is hot, you will definitely want to shorten it up as there is a fair amount of repetition.

Some of the hardest marks for many dogs are those which are tight and converging.  Another concept that is difficult can be tight hip pocket marks. 

Again, I wish I could draw these, or better yet, come and train with me and we can work on them together.  If my descriptions do not make sense, e-mail me privately and I will try to come up with something more easily understood.   I could even mail you a personally autographed set of drawings.

The following is a description of the drill working on increasing tightness of marks to one another.  It will be two diverging marks.  Again, when your dog understands this, you can then work on converging and hip pockets.

You will need one person and a mechanical thrower, or better yet, two persons to throw.  The first gun (which will become the memory bird) will make a throw from left to right which the dog will retrieve.

The second gun will start at a fair distance from the memory bird and will be throwing right to left.  With a young dog, you will want to pick up the memory bird as a single to start.  With an older or more trained dog, you can start with the double.  The memory bird is thrown and then the go bird.  The dog retrieves the two birds.  On the dog’s return from the memory bird, the gun moves closer to the memory bird.  The throws are repeated---obviously the two marks are now tighter to one another.  This sequence is carried out a third time and then you stop.  If the dog has no problem, when you repeat this drill at another time, you can start out with the throws even closer to one another until the third position is quite tight to the memory bird. 

Another time, you might throw the memory bird from right to left, have the moving gun throw from left to right, gradually tightening up the two converging marks.  This drill can be done as a hip pocket.  It can be done with the marks equidistant; the go bird short, while the memory bird is long; or the memory bird short and the go bird long.  Use your imagination as well as work on concepts where your dog is weak.

The dog knows where the memory bird is and becomes more and more comfortable with the configurations and the increasing tightness of the marks.  Remember to balance this so you aren’t always doing very tight converging or tight hip pockets.  When you run into a problem, back up and simplify.  This is to teach the dog not to challenge the dog.

                                                                                                          X

                                                                                                    G

                                                                                             (memory)  

         x         G1                  x        G2               x        G3

The above, hopefully, will give you some rough idea of the way you would do the first set of marks which I described.   The eventual tightness of G3 to the memory mark would vary as to the age and training of the dog.