Rap retrieving as a biddy pup
Brisa is five and a half, has been force fetched by me, is either not too smart and/or rather stubborn, food driven, would rather be a couch potato and has little natural carry.
Brisa retrieving a duck last June
Rapid started a little more than a week before Brisa, but is miles ahead of her in progress. After a little more than two weeks of almost daily work, he will pick up the dumbbell and put it in my hand. He almost always gets right to work instead of wandering around the house checking other things out - as far as he is concerned, getting me to give him treats is Job One! ;-)
Brisa on the other hand is coming along slowly, despite the fact she know how to retrieve - I'm not using any commands however, as I want this experiment to be as close to clicker training a retrieve as I'm willing to get. However, even tho she has to know what to do with a dumbbell when it is presented to her, she spends a lot of time avoiding by sniffing my hands, wandering off, sniffing the treat box on the desk, etc. She is up to more or less briefly picking the dumbbell off of the floor; I say more or less because we are still doing a lot of avoiding despite the heavy rewarding for any lifting of the dumbbell off of the floor.
I may have to do Brisa's training using her dinner as the rewards rather than doing it at night a couple of hours after dinner. She willingly eats the treats and seems to really want to work for them, but it may be that she needs to be hungry to get to the point of knocking off the avoiding work thing.
Or not. Brisa simply doesn't have much desire to work and will get out of it whenever she can. Her mother was even worse, so she comes by this honestly. I decided to experiment with shaping with her to see if that might make her more willing to work, so we'll see! Unless she stops trying and/or progressing, I'll keep at it.
