FAITH AND BELIEF DRILL
The following is a drill I watched
Alice Woodyard do with her young Lab. I
thought it had a lot of merit for training a transition dog to segue into cold
blinds. A few weeks later, I trained with
You don’t necessarily pick up
all of the bumpers. The purpose of
the drill is not to pick them all up or pick them up in a particular order.
The purpose is to build confidence when the dog first experiences cold
blinds and to develop a good blind running style (head up, not hunting) from the
start of the transition to cold blinds. You
repeat the drill for 3 days in the same field, placing the bumpers in different
places each session. After the 3
sessions, you do not keep doing the drill. Move
on to your next step. (If you need
to clean up a serious control problem, you would return to your earlier
foundation drills such as the single or double T, etc.)
The first bumper is placed in a direct line approximately 20 yards from the line. The dog can usually see it from the line and must be sure to see it when part way out to it, so that it can be retrieved without many casts. The other bumpers are red, and are placed in a zigzag manner with the next bumper being to the left (or right) of the original bumper. Bumper 2 should be approximately 20 yards from bumper 1. The distance to the remaining bumpers can be 30 – 50 yards from each other. Always set up so you can work with the wind from behind you, never in a cross wind or with the wind in your face.
There is only one bumper at each location, and no marking tape or stake to show the location, just the bumper. This is one reason you need to work in very short cover with this drill. The other reason for short cover is that heavy cover encourages the nose-down hunting style which we don’t want to encourage when starting a dog on cold blinds.
Both narrow and wide zigzags are
fine. You could use one on one day
and the other on the next day.
The dog is sent to bumper Number 1. Next, you will send the dog for bumper Number 2. Being a young dog, often he will try to return to the first bumper — where there is no bumper. You stop the dog when it gets there, and handle it to bumper 2. You continue through the sequence. Do not worry if your dog heads back to where he got his last bumper and do not reprimand him, just handle to the new location. The old locations generate momentum in the beginning dog. At the same time, they give your dog a reason to pay attention to your handles. “There is never a bumper to be found at the old spot! My trainer sure seems to know where they are, though.” Typically the dog stops trying to go to old locations part way through the first session.
This should be done three days in a row in the same field. Place the bumpers in different spots each day.
By the second day your dog may be so confident that this field is full of bumpers that his response to the Sit Whistle starts to degrade. This gives you a chance to reinforce your Sit Whistle. If your foundation collar work was done well, he will understand the correction and his Sit Whistle response will clean up immediately. Do not continue to collar-correct poor Sits if you do not see your correction eliminating the poor Sits right away. In this case your dog doesn’t have enough foundation for Sit corrections so go back to review foundation work in your yard drills.
No other collar corrections should normally be given in this drill. Especially do not collar-correct for poor casts. Allow some latitude for the dog’s response to casts. Move closer to cast if poor casting is a real problem. Do not call the dog back for a poor line. Handle him instead.
If you run into a problem getting him to one of the bumpers, use any of the other bumpers out there as an escape blind. Also, after you send him, stay flexible in your goal. You don’t have to pick up the particular bumper you sent for. You might want to reward the dog for giving you a beautiful enthusiastic response to a cast by “letting him roll” to a more distant bumper. By the 3rd session most dogs have spotted the zigzag pattern so they are also learning that field casting means they should change direction whether you previously taught “angle back” casts or not.
By the third day your dog will
have “faith” and “belief.” Faith
that there’s something out there to retrieve even though he never saw it
thrown or placed and doesn’t remember where it is.
Belief that being handled is the way to the retrieve in this situation.
The dog should be through the T pattern, sits on a whistle, and has been forced on back and collar conditioned before attempting this drill. If your dog falls apart on this, you have attempted to do it too soon as far as what the dog knows. If your dog is going out of control, you need to return to the yard and regain your control. If you get a no go, the dog is not ready, or else you have been giving him a reason to not enjoy the drill (too much correcting or reprimanding for his temperament).
I watched Alice run this with her
young dog two days in a row, and I was very impressed with the progress made in
that short period of time. The
attitude of the dog (and