Teaching the dog to lie down instantly at the end of the send away

Now the dog goes any place that we send it, but we still do not have a complete send away exercise.

On trial day, there will be no balls lying on the field for the dog to find. We will send it out and then down it at sixty or seventy yards. At this distance, as excited as the animal is, and as accustomed as it is to running until it finds a ball, downing it is not simply a matter of giving it the command.

If our control of the dog is tremendous, we can undoubtedly get it to lie down by screaming the command repeatedly, but probably not before it has searched about the field enough to be convinced that there is no ball to be found. This is, of course, not acceptable. We need it to drop instantly on the run as though shot. If we try to use sheer force and muscle to do the trick, running up the field at the dog in order to give it “what for” when it downs slowly, we will soon create some major training problems. Instead, in another beautifully elegant solution (taught to the authors by Janet Birk), we manipulate the dog’s expectations in order to make it eager to down for us.

The handler takes the dog to an old target spot that the animal knows well, and runs a series of multiple placed retrieves at very short distance–say forty feet or so. The target spot should have sufficient ground cover that the dog can only see the balls–or, conversely, can only tell that there are no balls on the target spot–when it is very close to it.

The handler runs a number of retrieves so that, every once in a while, he sends the dog to the target spot when it is empty. (All the balls have already been retrieved and are in the handler’s pockets.) When the dog gets to the spot, the handler shouts “Down!” If his control of his animal is good, at such a short distance the command will drive the dog quickly to the ground. The instant that the dog downs, his handler throws the ball to it, slinging it over the dog’s head and past it up the field.

As time passes, and this sequence occurs more frequently, the animal will make a discrimination:

• If the handler does not give the “Down!” command, then there is a ball out in the field waiting for the dog to run down on top of it. All that it must do in order to have the prey object is to keep going in a straight line.

• If, on the other hand, the handler says “Down!” then there is no ball out in the field for the dog. The ball will come instead from the handler and in order to have it the animal must turn toward him and drop to the ground.

Great care must be taken to balance the dog’s anticipation of finding the ball out in the field against its anticipation of having it thrown by its handler. If the ball comes too many times from the handler, the dog’s preoccupation with thinking about and looking for the throw will interfere with the send away. The animal will tend to look back over its shoulder, curve or even stop and turn and lie down prematurely. If, on the other hand, the dog finds the ball on the target spot too often, it will be slow to lie down when commanded, because it is certain that the ball awaits it out in the field, and it wants to keep on going until the ball is found.

The balance is a delicate one, and difficult to maintain. Sooner or later with most dogs we must use some compulsion to polish the send away and make it absolutely reliable.

Protection: Requirements of the Trial