Quote:
Originally Posted by Hog's Gone Fishin
My STUD Rott retrieved better than my Yellow lab. LOL
He was so loyal. I could put him in the back yard and give him the "SIT" command by hand signal. Go in the house and come back out 30 minutes later and he'd be sitting right there with his tough hanging out waiting for me.
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Not surprised at all. My daughter and I walk to school when the weather is nice and she walks him out there. I'll take him off lead on the way back. Our house is on the water and the dam is about 500 yards from our place. So I put him in a sit on the damn and walked the rest of the way home. Went inside, put his stuff away, made some coffee and a breakfast sandwich. Went back outside to my deck and there he was, still sitting on the far side of the dam looking at the house. I shouted a 'free' call and he was off like a shot back to the house and up the stairs. Came right to his heel position and sat by my leg.
Working dogs are exceptionally attentive and you can do really great things with them when you figure them out. But you have to realize that their brains are in many ways like a muscle - you've gotta get them using parts of it that they aren't hard-wired to use. The biggest hurdle is impulse control.
So an exercise that I recommend for anyone is a delayed gratification drill. Find their absolute favorite treat (for us its pepperoni). Put them in a sit and then stand with the treat open palmed in front of you at chest height. Bring it down slowly and when they make a move for it, close your hand around it. Don't say anything - let them figure it out. Let them nose and lick for however long it takes before they give up. They'll sit back down and look at you when they do.
Once that happens, start moving it back down again with an open palm. Move slowly (like, a foot every 20-30 seconds) until you get to their eye level. At eye level for them it's gonna be hard for them to maintain their sit and if he jumps at it again, close your hand, come back up, rinse repeat.
Over a week or so you'll get to where you can take that all the way to their nose and they won't lunge. Then you teach them a 'look' command so they lock eyes and hold it until you release them. And when you do, they get the treat. Over time you make them hold that look longer and longer until you can get them stock still, ignoring the treat and looking at you for a command for at least a minute. I can get a pretty much indefinite look/hold at this point.
It makes them focus so much on their impulse control. And you do that drill with them for a month and you're working that 'muscle' in their brain to where they eventually become capable of doing exactly what you're saying. Mine will sit and stare at his food bowl for 20 minutes until I yell 'take it' from wherever I am in the house. Because I worked the hell out of his impulse control.
But the bottom line is that if you have a working dog that ISN'T a high drive dog, you probably don't have a very good working dog. Those lines aren't going to be very good. So you need to understand how to work with and train a dog like that.
They're just very different.
And if you're not someone that wants to deal with all that - cool. I ain't mad at ya. Just get yourself a sporting dog. You're probably never going to get the kind of focus you can get from a working dog, but the barriers to entry on training one of those is essentially non-existent because they want so badly to please their owners.