Teach Your Bird Dog to Fetch a Bird

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Charlie McCanna. On behalf of Expert Village.com, I am going to talk to you today a little bit about retriever training. I brought along my pal Heidi, a master hunter and a hunting retriever champion to help us demonstrate. What I want to talk to you today about is the command for going out to retrieve. In the old days we used the term back; back meaning to go out and bring it back. But today, with so many people hunting with multiple dogs around, if you use that term, that dog and the other dog and the other dog are all going to want to go out and bring back the bird, which can be quite confusing in the field. And when you are hunting, you shoot a bird, you want your dog to go retrieve your bird; you don’t want your buddy’s dog to take off and go get your bird and bring it back. So, what we use nowadays is we use simply the dog’s name. So, once you have got your dog going out and retrieving, and as we talked about earlier, when you are working on getting them go on a long lead, you use their name every time you want them to go out. You might have to start out with using their name and the word back, but after a while your dog is going to understand that simply their name is the command for going out here. I will demonstrate… mark… Heidi… Now if I am out hunting with Heidi, Zeus and Pepper and Heidi hears her name, Zoos and Pepper are not going to go out and chase my bird. Heidi heel… mark… Heidi… If you do that, that will cut a lot of confusion and anger in the field hunting, or just when you are out working with other people. And your dog will soon learn that when they hear their name, that belongs to them and only them. Practice that and I think it will help you."