Last year, Tassla and I went to a small town called Lysekil to do a working test for spaniels.
I really want to encourage all of you who have a spaniel and are curious about hunt to start on a working test – it is great in so many ways:
- It’s a great way to find out on which level you and your dog are in the training.
- It’s a great way to find out what it will be like on a field trial later on – a working test is shorter though and you are not required to flush game.
- It’s a great way to “check” how you yourself handle a new situation, for instance that other people who you don’t know are watching you, that you don’t know when there will be a shot or a throw, and that you have to do what the judge says, and that you can’t decide everything yourself (so it’s very different from your own training).
- It’s a great way to “check” if your dog manages all this!
- It’s a great way to train the dog to be in a new environment – to just be in the environment and see what your dog does when other dogs are training, when there are sudden shots, and so on. You will find out how your dog handles this type of situations.
A working test helps you to find out what behaviors you need to train more and then you can go home and do exactly that. And a working test is fun and unpretentious, and you also get an opportunity to get feedback from an experienced judge, regarding both your dog and yourself.
The working test in Lysekil was a novice working test, which means that I didn’t have to cast my dog to blind retrieves. However, there were three shots and throws – that is, three marked retrieves. The dog is judged when she hunts and how she fetches the three dummies. My guess is that it took about seven to ten minutes to do the whole test.
If you do a working test for retrievers the test is divided into different stations, but if you do a working test for spaniels you do the whole test in one sweep – at least that’s how it works in Sweden and it might of course be different in other countries. In Lysekil, we walked across a meadow that sloped down toward a small ditch with bushes. At the edges, there were a lot of thickets, and in the middle of the meadow they had built some kind of barrier, like a fence. One of the marked retrieves fell on the other side of the fence. The other marked retrieve was a little tricky because it fell half behind those bushes and out on another meadow.
We were also asked to cast the dogs in to the thicket when we passed by.
My goal this day was to find out how far we are in the training, and I had decided that I would only use the whistle if absolutely necessary, and otherwise I would only work with small signals and very quietly. I did a good job.
Tassla was very excited when she realized what was going on. I warmed up with a few marked retrieves that I threw over her head and picked up myself – so it was rather difficult for her. We were at a healthy distance from those who started the working test. If she starts to bark or whine, we are too close. I also let her hunt for some tidbits (so she was able to get rid of some of her energy – her energy level was high, of course) and I rewarded her when she was still and silent.
When Tassla hunted I thought she was very obedient, a little too obedient. She did fine, but she wasn’t really engaged in the exercise. I think that she is getting a little bored with hunting in areas where there is no game or game scent. She must, of course, be able to do that later, but now I think that it’s time for us to move on and make it more difficult. She needs to get out and hunt for game, get a chance to get a real scent and to flush.
However, I am pleased with all the rest! When it was time for the first marked retrieve, she sat down on the shot, and the judge actually praised us afterwards for her elegant marked retrieves. I was superhappy with her work. Once she was a little disturbed by the gun, who opened his gun, and when it clicked she turned towards him, exactly in the same moment as I was going to cast her. But although she lost focus on the marked retrieve for a second, she went straight to it and took it. Very nice! And the last one was also a little difficult, but she nailed it too.
She held the dummy a little sloppy – I thought – (but I’ve got the grip from obedience training in my mind so…) but she never dropped the dummy; she took it at once and held on to it. And she did a great delivery to hand. I have two different kinds of deliveries to hand and both worked well. One is to push the dummy straight into my outstretched palm, and the other one is to sit in front of me and hold on to the dummy until I reach out my hand for it and say thank you. The signal for the latter one is that I stand straight up.
The judge Olle Johanisson gave her 80 points out of 90 – and therefore we won, and that was of course really nice. The best with the whole working test was probably all the nice things that the judge said when he gave Tassla her award; that Tassla seems to have great capability for the gun dog training, and he praised her marked retrieves and deliveries to hand.
So, now I urge everybody that is interested in hunting and has a spaniel to find the nearest working test and just do it! Let it be a fun part of the training; your dog and you will learn more, and you will find out where you are in your training.
Today I found out that Tassla can move on to a novice field trail, and then she will have a chance to flush game. It’s time for us to move on.
