Pre-Shooting Season Cold Game Training

For a good number of my working clients it’s nearly time to take their dog into the shooting field for their first time this year. All summer they have trained hard instilling good solid foundations in readiness. Some clients set off on their training journey with the intention of working their dogs in the field. Others wanted a well trained working dog to be a family dog. When they experienced the thrill of training a working dog, many decided they’d like to take their dogs beating or picking up.

Most of the training this weekend has focused on ensuring all the dogs can handle and deliver game to hand. This cold game training is an essential element in preparing your gundog for the field. Not only do they need to deliver well to hand without damaging the bird, it’s important they can hunt it out and take direction at a distance.

Every dog did amazingly well. The smiles and sense of achievement seen from my clients makes my job even more rewarding. Most dogs had already experienced cold game training over the last few months but one dog in particular hadn’t. Cooper (show in the photo above) had worked on fur dummies but had never handled a pheasant. When I first started training Cooper in Oct 2018 he was a very defiant and lively young dog. The thought of him working in the field was a dream, the priority was an obedient well behaved dog. Today he proved what all the training and challenges had been for. Not only did he deliver the pheasant perfectly to hand, he worked on direction and distance control to find the bird.

November 2nd is a big day for many. I look forward to hearing back on progress and I will certainly be sharing my clients experiences on my blog.

Posted: October 28, 2019