Here’s another entry on my favorite blog topic – the stop whistle! This time I’m posting a video that shows how I begin proofing the stop whistle. Tassla was five months old at the time and if you want to know how I began working on the stop whistle, you can read about it in an older post, ”Sit, sit, sit”.

This training suits both spaniels and retrievers. Since I have a spaniel, my goal is to have her sit after flushing, but if you have a retriever this will be fun distraction training where you’ll teach your dog to really pay attention to and respond to the whistle in truly all occasions.

This is the first two training sessions with distractions. Then the only limit to this exercise is your imagination!

I’ll now move on to make the exercise more difficult by creating situations where I have a helper pulling a long line with a toy attached to it. I’ll walk over the grounds like we’re out on a walk and then all of a sudden the toy will appear on the ground – and be pulled off. Before we try this I’ll repeat what we did in the session before this, in order not to make it too difficult. This raise in criteria will be tough enough anyway! I promise to report back on how we’re doing…