Teach Your Bird Dog to Mark a Bird

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Charlie McCanna. On behalf of Expert Village.com, we are going to talk a little today about retriever training. What we are going to work on today is what is called a mark; it means you are getting the dog to mark a bumper, a bird, what have you. We are going to work on a single first and we will go on from there. I brought along my pal Heidi to demonstrate. Heidi is a master hunter, hunter retriever champion, but I think she will do just fine to demonstrate this. And this is what you start off with a puppy, after you have got them working with a long lead and bringing the bumpers back, now that you can come out into the field, and you can work off lead. Now I’ve got Heidi at heel here, and I am going to throw a single bumper, a little bit farther than you can work with a long lead. And when I do that I will say the word mark, and she is going to look for it, and I will use her name to send her after it. I will demonstrate it. Heidi… mark… Heidi… Now Heidi is going to go out and fetch the bumper and come back. Same thing that we were doing with the long lead in the earlier session, but this will allow you to do much more long distance things than you could before. Mark… Heidi… If you notice the dog is focussed on the bumper because Heidi is so excited about retrieving, as will be your retriever if you start off and have lots of fun with them, and teach them to enjoy retrieving. That will get you started on basic retrieving."