[nagdu] teaching retrieving without encouraging scavenging

[Shanna Stichler]

Honestly, dogs I've worked who could retrieve for me, a trained 
retrieve, never showed much interest in scavenging. The behaviors might 
look outwardly similar, but to the dog, I believe they are not at all 
the same thing.

As to why schools stopped teaching the retrieve, it takes a while if you 
do it the traditional way, which was how everyone taught retrieval back 
in the day, and can be physically demanding for instructors. I know that 
with my dog, even though I didn't use the old-school ear pinch method, 
the first few days of retrieval training kind of broke her brain, so I 
couldn't use her very much as a guide for those few days. I knew that 
would happen and planned accordingly, so my life wasn't completely 
destroyed by 3 days of Diamond doing light to no guide work. Oh, and 
yeah ruling out dogs who didn't like to retrieve or couldn't master that 
concept probably did cause otherwise perfectly nice guide dogs to become 
career changes.

Wanting a working retrieve was partly why I decided to owner train when 
I got my last dog. I could've gotten a program dog and taught the 
retrieve later, but I find that because program dogs are taught from 
such an early age not to put things in their mouths, that they have a 
hard time understanding that the rules can be different, making it 
difficult to teach them to fetch things for me.

Shanna with Diamond


On 7/21/2015 9:05 PM, The Pawpower Pack via nagdu wrote:
> In my experience, retrieval-based tasks have very little to do with scrounging or food refusal.  Personally, my best retriever is also the best at refusing to scrounge.
> She has, in the past, picked up cooked bones when a box of chicken wings fell on the floor and I fully trusted her to give them back to me.  She has also retrieved wrapped packages of raw meat.
> She is 13 and is still retrieving my shoes and her water bowl and whatever else I might drop every day.
>
>
>   Rox and the kitchen Bitches:
> Mill'E, Laveau, Soleil
> Pawpower4me at gmail.com
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Jul 21, 2015, at 9:38 PM, Debby Phillips via nagdu <nagdu at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>
>> Vivianna, that is not why Seeing Eye stopped teaching the Fetch command.  It is a difficult thing to teach, it ruled out some dogs that would have otherwise made wonderful guides, it is physically hard on instructors, as well.  Plus there were things that at least Seeing Eye felt were more important, like intensifying the training for traffic.  I miss the Fetch command, but my third dog was the most excellent at it.  I could drop something and she would come and pick it up for me and give it to me.    Blessings,    Debby and Nova
>>
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