The Spaniel Annals

When Susan Desilver described Gael’s litter to me over the phone, one of my first questions was, “which puppy likes to carry things around in her mouth?”  What I was looking for were early signs of a natural retrieve.  In my earlier posts about the natural retrieve, I talk about how much it reveals in terms of the dog’s trainability and willingness work as a team player.  I think all sporting breed breeders would benefit from adding the natural retrieve to their puppy testing (if they don’t already).  In my ideal world, breeders would keep the puppy who presents not only the best conformation, but also the best puppy retrieve.  Many, many obedience trainers, including Guide Dogs for the Blind, use the retrieve as the single most significant indicator of temperament in their puppy testing; what if show breeders started to do the same, and selected for the best retrieving as well as the best structure? 

As I’ve play-trained with Gael these first few weeks, I’ve been thrilled with the signs she shows of natural retrieving.  As the video below shows, she’s not perfect, but she shows many wonderful traits:

• a high drive to retrieve the object
• while she’s still learning the best way to pick up objects, she quite sensibly chooses the dowel of the dumbbell rather than the bell
• an ability to run with the object in her mouth
• a willingness to come to me with just a bit of coaxing on my part*
• the willingness to retrieve lots of different objects

*I’ve had good results with turning away from the puppy on the return so the return becomes a chase game; I also borrow from schutzhund training, where the trainer doesn’t always take the object from dog.  Thus the puppy doesn’t associate coming back with the loss of the object.