The Food Bowl as a Brilliant Training Aid

Do you want to train casting with your dog but don’t yet have the delivery sorted? Then we want to put in a good word for food bowls. 🙂
With bowls you can work on straight lines, lefts and rights, and further back – and at the same time get distance stop signals and all kinds of distractions in place. This simple tool really is a multi-tool you can use for a lot of things.

We teach our puppies casting using food bowls. You can absolutely work at long distances if you want to, but during winter it’s perfect to fiddle with the details indoors. That’s a great opportunity to train the different types of casting while adding distractions from other bowls.
We always start by teaching straight lines (the dog is cast straight ahead from your side), mainly because they’re so easy to begin with and because they’re extremely important. The fastest way from point A to point B is, after all, to run straight to B – and in a perfect world, flawless straight lines would be all you need to bring the retrieve in. 😉
Reality doesn’t quite work like that, though, which is why you also need further back and lefts and rights. Further back, by the way, is the most commonly used type of casting in spaniel work. (But you need all types even with a spaniel.)

In this post, however, we’re going to share how you can start with lefts and rights. (You’ll find videos and posts about the other types of casting elsewhere on the blog.)
This is how I (Lena) usually begin with my dogs: I place a small treat next to the dog and click when the dog looks at it. Then I start adding a sideways point at the same time as the dog looks to the side, followed by pointing a little before the dog starts to look – and finally pointing so that the dog looks. After that, I switch to a food bowl (since a tiny treat won’t be visible outdoors).

Both Elsa and I first indicate the direction for the dog, wait for the dog to look, and then cast. You don’t have to do it that way. 😉 Many people cast the dog to the side while giving the command, pointing, and stepping sideways at the same time. We prefer the control you get from knowing that the dog is actually thinking about going in the same direction as the one you’re pointing to.

Here’s an example of how that can look in the beginning: