Back tying the dog

The first step in teaching the out is to create for ourselves a great mechanical advantage over the dog. After all, we are preparing to take the sleeve from its mouth or, more correctly, to force the dog to relinquish it. We have already spent months teaching the animal to be extraordinarily passionate and stubborn about keeping its bite against all opposition. Now we will have to overcome this stubbornness, and it will have to be done smoothly and precisely and with as little fuss as possible.

If we attempt to wrestle the sleeve from the dog by simply pulling or prying or jerking it backward off the sleeve, we often just succeed in teaching the animal to hold on more tenaciously, because we inadvertently stimulate the same oppositional reflex in it that we exploited in order to fix its mouth on the sleeve during drive work.

The trick is to correct into the sleeve. We begin by tethering the animal to a post or a tree on its leather agitation collar with about ten feet of line. In addition to the agitation collar, the dog wears a correction collar, which is fitted so that the leash attaches to it under its jaw. In other words, the correction collar faces forward, not back.

The handler and his assistant (who controls the correction leash) both stand outside the dog’s circle, facing it, and the decoy works in between them and the dog, being careful not to foul the correction line. If the agitator wears a left‑handed sleeve, then the assistant stands to his left, or vice versa. Thus, when the dog is on the sleeve, the correction leash will run from the collar, under the decoy’s elbow, and to the assistant. If the assistant cranes his neck a little, he can still see the dog’s mouth on the sleeve–so that he does not inappropriately correct an animal that is already outing.

The tether line and the correction leash form a straight line running directly from the tree to the assistant’s hands. With the tree to anchor it, all the force of any correction is transmitted directly to the dog’s neck. Therefore, it is possible for the assistant to administer an effective correction with precisely the amount of force he intends, neither too harsh nor too light.

The traditional method, in which the handler corrected back and away from the helper with no anchoring post, made for a very sloppy correction because the decoy’s arm absorbed a great deal of the force intended for the dog. A hard correction would simply drag both helper and dog a little closer to the handler rather than force the animal off the sleeve. The result was often that, in the end, excessive force was used in order to accomplish the out. For this reason, the back‑tie method described here is actually far kinder to the dogs.