How to Train Puppies to Retrieve Birds

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Charlie McCanna, and on behalf of Expert Village.com, I am here to speak to you a little bit about retriever training. I brought along my pal Heidi, a master hunter to help us out here. We are going to be talking little about basic retriever training with puppies. When you start working with your dog, and you are trying to teach the puppy to pick up a bumper and come back—which will be same as picking up a bird and bringing it back—it is best to start off with a long lead. As you see I have got a 50 yard lead that will enable the dog to go out a fairly good long ways. But yet, if the puppy is young, they are going to want to pick up that toy, that bumper, that bird and run off with it. But you don’t want that to happen because you want them always to be bringing it back. You want them to have success; success means bringing it back, you throw it again. Pretty quickly they coincide or they attribute that to bringing it back; that is retrieving to them. I will demonstrate with Heidi. Heidi… Now if Heidi were to pick up the bumper and not come back, I would of course pick up the rope and bring it back to me and pull her back until she has achieved perfection with this, and then we can do without the lead. But when you are working with a puppy, it’s always best to keep a long rope on them just to keep control of them. And I think Heidi can definitely demonstrate this one more time. Heidi… now your puppy of course, when you throw the bumper, is going to take off immediately, especially if you instill in them a love of retrieving. You want them to be excited about it, and you want them to take off immediately. Until you get the sit and stay commands down, like Heidi has them, you want them to feel like this and all excited and happy and… you want to play… you want to play… but you do want them to bring it right back, hence the long lead helps out quite a bit in that. Try the long lead, and I think it will save you a lot of headaches."