Tom Dokken's Top 10 Tips for Dog Training

Senior ProStaff Tom Dokken has forgotten more about dog training than most of us will ever know, so it'd be almost impossible to get everything in one place, but Tom shared some of his Top 10 Tips for dog training:

1. Never give a command you can't enforce. If you do, your dog will develop selective hearing.

2. There are 3 stages to finishing a new command: 1. Teaching the command and helping your dog through the processes, 2. Repetition, and 3. Discipline.

3. If you've got a waterfowl dog, you should also have a neoprene vest for cold weather hunting and early autumn water work.

4. Teaching your dog to track birds is a real good skill. Start by grabbing your dog's favourite training dummy and giving it a whiff with some liquid scent. Then, drag it a short way, like ten metres, and leave your dummy at the end of the scent trail. Give the command 'Dead bird' and get your dog started at the beginning of the scent drag. Once your dog's good with short drags, you can up the distance of the drag. Eventually, your dog will be confident to stick with the scent over long distances

5. Teaching your dog to respond to the whistle is easy. Follow these steps: 1. Give your verbal command then follow it straight away with your whistle, i.e. “come” then repeated blasts on the whistle, 2. use the whistle first then give the verbal command, and 3. eliminate the verbal command and just use the whistle.

6. All dogs are hardwired to hunt for tucker. This means from the get-go they'll work for food too. Treat rewards can be used as early as 7 weeks to teach commands like come, sit, stay, down and kennel. It's a ripper way to start training them commands when they're young. Later on you can knock off the treats and use praise as the reward for working.

7. Here's a quick way to train your pup to track down injured birds: First have your pup fetch a bird wing. Then tie a four foot length of fishing line to your wing. Attach it to the end of a fishing rod. Let your pup chase and grab the wing on the ground. This will encourage their natural chase and catch instincts and get your pup ready for a live bird.

8. All waterfowl dogs should learn to work out of a boat. Start in the back and with your boat on dry land. Next work on retrieving out of the boat. Second step, take your boat to the edge, where your dog can jump out into shallow water to retrieve, followed by jumping into deeper water. Until your dog will jump out of your boat into water that's over his head.

9. If you hunt upland birds with your retriever or spaniel, a beeper collar is a top tool to keep tabs on your dog in thick scrub. Also if you run a beeper on locate only mode your dog can learn to check in with you when it hears the beeper go off when you press the locate button.

10. Here's a simple way to teach your dog to drink from a water bottle. Smear a bit of peanut butter on the bottle's end and let your doggo have a lick. After a couple of goes, your dog will be set to start drinking water from your bottle.

For more info from Tom, have a squiz at his book Retriever Training. What are your Top 10 tips for training dogs?