I will be straight forward with you. If you want to run nothing but Field Trials, I am not your man, but I do know some good trainers I could send you to. I like to train dogs for being a good hunting companion and if you want a real good one, it is best to get your dog entered in the AKC Hunt Test.

It’s up to you as to how much you want to put into your dog. I prefer to start with a young pup, somewhere between 4 to 6 months old, is the best. I think that is a critical time to get a pup started on sit-stay-come and most importantly, to retrieve. At that age, my goal is to make the pup love to retrieve. Besides the breeding background, that is the time to give that pup the desire to retrieve which will never leave them.

I teach them to sit-stay and come to the whistle. I have both live and dead pigeons I use along with training bumpers. I am not like a lot of other trainers when it comes to force fetch. I go by the individual dog and how I think that dog will take the pressure of a “Force Hold”. That’s right, a Force Hold not Force Fetch. If you want your dog to deliver to a hand or want to run Hunt Tests, it must go through some kind of force.

I have trained some dogs on my bench with a Force Fetch, but I have trained all my dogs by what I call my Force Hold. I feel that a dog that loves to retrieve should not have to go through the pressure of a Force Fetch. That doesn’t make it wrong; it’s just not my way.

When the dog is ready, I start using one of my two remote bird and bumper throwers to teach longer and longer marking on the land then water. I use a combination of bumpers, live birds and dead birds when training. I have 10 acres at my house with a small pond on it that I work the young pups on. I am leasing over 100 acres about one mile from my house to train the older dogs on. So if this sounds like something that might fit you and your dogs needs, please give me a call or email me. Thanks!