banknote wrote:Hey Olly, I'm interested to know if you ever got this straightened out. It's an issue I'm actively trying to avoid with Ki by not handling unless he's way off the mark and going the wrong direction. I'm actually afraid I may have started handing a little too early with him only being 16 months old. He does occasionally stop to look for direction, but only after and extended search.
Do you think working on visible backs at interval distances, building to a long blind, might work? Like go out in a big mowed field, set visible white bumpers in a line at 25 yard intervals with an orange/blind bumper at the end. Send him back for each successive bumper all the way through to the final blind. Seems like it would build confidence and momentum to drive deeper.
I also do a fair bit of "find it" drills, where I set a fairly short blind and instead of giving him a line, I caste him to a general area and say "find it," which just means it's in there somewhere, find it! Then I just let him hunt. I figure this is good practice for cripples that have moved from where they were seen to fall or blinds where I haven't made a good mark for myself.
Pretty sure the series of bumpers you're asking about is called a "ladder drill" and is, or at least was, common way of extending blind line distance in pups, so your training instincts are working.
Could say the same about letting Ki roll to build momentum down range even though he's veering off line, but when teaching blinds you also want to be sure you're teaching him that following your direction will get him to the bumper, so there should be no "extended search," and hardly any search at all, while training blinds. Finding the bumper by searching, rather than taking direction, has the counterproductive effect of making Pup think it's searching, rather than taking direction, that's gotten him the retrieve that's his reward - so why listen to Pop when he could be searching?
I'd suggest keeping handling and "find it" two very separate things (literally, in terms of time and venue, too) until Ki's handling is well developed and conditioned.