I have just trained my first dog. She turned a year old on Friday and is doing well. I am by no means giving advice, but I'll tell you how my dad does it and how I did it. My ol man has trained a lot of dogs and what he does is put the dog up on a table where you can work with it. He then drives a post into the ground, puts a choke collar on the dog, ties one end to the post and ties a rope to the other end. You pull on your rope until the dog is choking and put the dummy in front of its mouth and yell fetch. When the dog is choked enough, you yell fetch again, shove the dummy in its mouth and let the pressure off of the choke collar. It then learns that every time it grabs the dummy, the pressure is released. My old man says it only takes a few time of doing this for a week.
I tried it my own way. She started out retrieving but not holding. I would put the dummy in her mouth and command hold. If she dropped it, i would grab her ear until she started hollering, shove the dummy in her mouth again, holler hold, and let her loose. If she dropped it, I would repeat until she would hold it. In the beginning I would only make her hold it for 5 seconds or so and command drop. Every day I would do this and extend her hold time. I have to tuner her up every once in a while, but she holds great now.
She did have a few episodes where she didn't really want to fetch. I force fetched her by taking my keys out and applying a light pressure to the inside of her ear with the tip of a key. It don't take much pressure to make them holler.
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