You can't outsmart a smart one!

It was lesson time again for the Will-be-bestest-gundog:

"We'll start with the rabbit pen" said the Man "See if you can get him to hunt around in there and make sure if a rabbit moves, he sits"

"Right" I said. "Out you get" I tell the W-b-b-g who, giving Rory
a sidelong glance, does that and walks perfectly to heel down

to where - he knows - the pen is.
And when we get there I let him off his lead and tell
him 'go seek'.

And off he goes.
Not exactly fast. But he goes.
Which is more than he did last time.

And he spends the next 15 minutes happily - though still somewhat warily -
hunting up rabbits and sitting to every one that moves - even marking them before they move. And he jumps 'Over' a fence on command when it's in his path.

"Been practising that I see" says our trainer.

He's so good I get complacent and 'forget' to whistle him to sit.

So I get severely reprimanded for "sloppy handling"!

Eventually Gunner tells us that we're dumb. He's chased out all the rabbits and we've not caught a single one, so it's time he stopped. Seems reasonable.

So Rory tests him out with a dummy. Thinking there's no way he's going to retrieve in the midst of all the rabbits. But he does.

Full marks.

"Excellent" says the man "Not much more we can teach him here"and off we go to practice some retrieving in an adjacent paddock.

Gunner is so focussed on the rabbit pen that for a while he fails to focus on the dummies being thrown. "Dummy" his eyes say "What dummy?"

For a while clearly I'm the dummy since I keep telling him to go off to fetch something he says doesn't exist.

But we persist and eventually he believes me and after a while we're off again. The only hiccups we encounter are handler hesitancies again - it's difficult to know how much help to give the dog .... but the answer, it seems, is 'as much as it takes to help him understand' and when he does understand, "be more confident and crisp with the instructions!" Right! OK, Got that. And so we continue.

Then Rory tells me he's dropped a 'blind retrieve' in a bundle of twigs and branches and I'm to 'handle' Gunner in order to help him find and fetch it.

Since even I have not seen where it went it's a genuine case of the blind leading the blind.

But Gunner follows all my instructions and..... finds the dummy easily!

He is such a star.

"All the homework is definitely paying off" says the trainer. "He listens to you and understands every command you give him - he's still the most laid back spaniel I've ever come across but he has a certain style when he gets to work!"

Then he admits that he had thought that Gunner wouldn't hunt in the rabbit pen so it would be a very short and sticky lesson!

So for homework we have to now "push the dog" and give him increasingly difficult questions to answer.......

But there'll be no lessons tonight cos it's pouring with rain.... and the young dog can carry on sleeping in blissful ignorance of the scheming that's going on in the name of turning him into the Worlds'-bestest-gundog in time for the coming season. Which is only a little over two months away now.......