Gundog Training Tess the Springer Spaniel, Preston, Lancashire.

One of my 1-2-1 gundog training sessions today were with John and his 21 month old Springer Spaniel, Tess.  John originally came to me in May 2013 for a training assessment, however due to personal circumstances he was unable to commit to regular training sessions.  It was great to see John and Tess return today as John is now in a position to start gundog training with Tess and is fully committed to successfully training Tess to her breed standard.  Today’s session was spent reassessing Tess whilst preparing a suitable training programme and a focus for John to work on between training sessions.

When John arrived for training I was working with 3 of my young Springer Spaniels.  John was very impressed and asked if he could have a dog trained to their standard.  Despite that they are my dogs and are trained on a regular basis, they are still very young and they require lots of hard work to get them to the level I require for working out in the field.  Despite this, it is great to receive compliments and I did explain to John that training a dog is not just about the commands, but more so about the bond and respect that you get from your dog.

Despite Tess being a beautiful dog she has been allowed to get away with almost anything and has very little structure or boundaries.  It was decided that it would be best if John went back to working on the basics with Tess as if she was a new dog/puppy.  During the lesson I used my dogs to demonstrate to John the results that can be achieved with any dog if they are given structure boundaries and consistency with training.

With the correct training, Tess can be a successful working dog and companion who John will be able to work with when out beating in the shooting field.  I look forward to working and training with John and seeing the progress that they make over the coming weeks.

Posted: December 1, 2013