Teach Your Bird Dog to Respond to a Whistle

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Charlie McCanna, and on behalf of Expert Village.com, I am going to talk to you today a little bit about retriever training. One of the basics in retriever training is teaching your dog how to respond to a whistle. A whistle is used because when you are hunting, you often are too far away to yell at your dog or call to your dog, and the dog’s hearing can pick up a whistle much, much better. So when you want your dog’s attention you want to them to sit and look at you. The best way to get started with this is when you are working on your heeling, and you want your dog to sit rather than stopping and saying sit. Once you have got the sit command down, you start blowing your whistle and then saying sit. After a while your dog will assume that the whistle is the same thing as the sit command. I will demonstrate this with Heidi. Heidi heel… Sit… Heidi heel…. Sit. Notice that I stopped to make her sit just like you would when you are heeling, but I used the whistle at the same time as well. That way the dog starts referring to the whistle as the same as they would a sit command or the stop command. And that will get you started for when you get into more advanced retriever training and you need your dog to sit at a distance on the whistle."