Whistle Sits for Hunting Retrievers

This course is offered as an online course and as a pay-for-view video stream. It is designed to take you through the progression of teaching hunting retrievers (or really any dog) to sit to a whistle when out in the field. It's imperative that we maintain control of our dogs when out in the field. Having them sit to the whistle is often the first component to controlling our dogs when they are away from us at a distance.

This course covers teaching dogs to sit to the whistle in a way that is meaningful and fair to the dog. We use various motivational, reward-based methods to teach the various training steps. We also look at how to introduce various tools such as the electronic collar to make the behavior of whistle sitting more durable.

Even if you don't have a hunting retriever and just want to train your dog to sit to a whistle, this course will teach you how to break down various pieces of this exercise for training, and then bring them together for the final behavior of sitting off leash to a whistle. It will give you an idea of how and when we use various rewards to set the dog up for success and how we introduce tools like the leash and electronic collar in a way that is thoughtful, fair, and effective.

Traditionally, many hunting dog trainers rely heavily on the use of pressure and force to teach their dogs various behaviors. Our training video uses a reward-based training system that results in a fast and happy dog that likes to train.

Once our dog understands the behaviors we want, we will layer pressure over those behaviors. You will see that the kind of pressure is age and dog dependent. This simply means that every dog is different and training plans need to be based on the age and temperament of the dog. The goal of our training program is to produce dogs who are eager to work, yet still compliant to our requests without the need of continued use of rewards or aversive tools.