10 Lessons From 10 Years of LWDG: What Your Gundog Actually Needs

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You got a working breed because someone told you they were intelligent, loyal, and trainable. All of that is true. What nobody mentioned is that those same qualities, the drive, the energy, the focus, the instinct to use their nose and their mouth all day long without switching off, are precisely what make life with them feel like so much work if you do not have the right framework.

This episode is ten years of that framework, compressed into the ten lessons I most wish every pet gundog owner had heard at the beginning. Not rules. Not a training programme. The understanding that changes how you see the dog in front of you, and what you ask of yourself when you show up.

Everything here comes from my own ten years of conversations with women handling working breeds as family pets, inside Found It, Fetched It and across the community we have built inside LWDG.

Your Dog Is Not Being Difficult. It Is Being a Gundog.

When your spaniel tears apart the house or your retriever grabs everything in sight, the first thing most of us feel is that we have done something wrong. That the training has failed. That we have somehow produced an unmanageable dog.

What is actually happening is much simpler. Working breeds were purpose-built to run, problem-solve, use their nose and mouth, and drive all day without switching off. The breed was designed to go out and work, come home, and live in kennels. It was not designed for the sofa. That does not mean it cannot do the sofa. It absolutely can. But the gap between what the genetics are asking for and what the environment provides is the thing you are managing every day.

The dog is not the problem. The mismatch is. And once you understand that, you can stop fighting it and start working with it.

Takeaway: Understanding what you have actually got is the first step to training what you want. You are teaching a predator to be a pet. That takes more time with a gundog. Give yourself and the dog that time.

More Exercise Is Not the Answer

You will not out-walk a gundog. I have never seen anyone manage it. More walks do not produce a calmer dog. They produce a fitter one. What you are doing when you add another hour to the lead is essentially putting your dog through marathon training it never asked to do, building stamina and arousal in the process, not draining it.

What actually moves the needle is what happens before and after the walk. Small hunting games, search and find, scent work, structured training, and calm decompression. Teaching your dog steadiness and self-control so it can manage its own arousal levels rather than relying on exhaustion to do that job.

If your dog is wired the moment you get home, the problem was not your effort. You went out and did the work. It was the type of effort.

Takeaway: You can absolutely have a gundog who goes to the beach, walks miles, goes up the mountain. But that is not the thing that controls their energy. Structure, mental engagement, and decompression do that. The walk is part of the package, not the solution.

The Two Minds Are Not a Metaphor

Every dog operates from two states: the thinking and learning brain, and the instinctive, reactive one. When your dog is overwhelmed, too excited, or too scared, the thinking brain goes offline. And when that happens, no amount of training will reach them. There is no point trying harder. Your job at that moment is not to train more. It is to bring them back online first.

A dog that will not take a treat when you are outside is not stubborn. It is wound up. The treat is not interesting because nothing is interesting when the reactive mind has taken over. Getting them calm enough to notice you is the session. Once you understand what mind you are dealing with at any given moment, everything about how you respond changes.

I always come back to this: when you can get a spaniel interested in your sandwich, they are calm. That is your signal. Not the sit, not the stay. Whether they can actually be with you in the moment.

Takeaway: You cannot teach a dog who is not in the room with you. Recognising when the thinking brain has gone offline, and knowing that your job is to bring it back before you do anything else, is one of the most useful shifts you will make.

Consistency Is Kindness, Not Control

Dogs do not need you to be harsh or loud. They need you to be clear. The confusion that causes most pet gundog problems is not a lack of rules. It is rules that keep changing depending on who is in the room, how tired you are, or whether you have guests.

Your dog is constantly reading information from you about what is safe, what to expect, and what is coming next. When those signals scramble, the behaviour scrambles with them. Consistency is not a control strategy. It is how you let your dog know that you are going to ask the same things each time, so they can relax into that.

This extends to the whole household. If you are consistent and everyone else lets the dog get away with things, it becomes hard for the dog to know what behaviour actually looks like at home. Bringing your family into the same framework is not being precious about training. It is being kind to the dog.

Takeaway: You do not have to be perfect. But you do have to be readable. The clearer your signals, the less work the dog has to do trying to figure you out.

You Are Allowed to Be the Handler

This was probably the hardest lesson I had to learn myself. Ten years of conversations, and the single most damaging thing I see over and over is the gap between the handler a woman thinks she should be and who she actually is, and the guilt that lives in that gap.

The handler your dog needs is not the polished version you see on YouTube who has been doing this for twenty years. It is you, showing up honestly, learning as you go. The training that sticks is always the training that fits your actual life. You have to find a way to learn alongside the dog without apologising for where you are.

Even the best trial dogs in the UK have off days. Their handlers walk off the field and say it did not go as it should have, and that is fine. You need to give yourself the same.

Takeaway: You do not need to feel confident before you act. You act, and confidence follows. The handler your dog needs is the one who keeps showing up, not the one who has already arrived.

Recall Is a Relationship Skill

If your dog does not come back reliably, the question is not usually which method you are using. It is whether coming back to you is genuinely worth it from the dog's point of view.

Recall is built in all the moments that have nothing to do with actually calling your dog. It is built in every interaction, every reward, every time you have made returning to you feel like the best decision they have made all day. When you recall and immediately put the lead on and put them in the car, the dog learns that the whistle means the fun ends. You have accidentally made your recall into a bad date.

The same instinct that makes them brilliant in the field, the drive, the focus, the environmental pull, is the thing you are up against when you pip that whistle at the park. So the recall has to be worth more than whatever they are already doing. And you build that over hundreds of ordinary moments, not in a training session at the end of the lead.

Takeaway: Make the recall the best part, not the full stop. Even if the lead goes on afterwards, the return to you needs to be genuinely worth it. That is what you are building, not a command. A habit of choosing you.

Take What Fits. Leave What Does Not.

Traditional gundog training carries decades of genuinely useful understanding of working breeds: drive, focus, instinct, structure. That knowledge absolutely applies to your dog whether you intend to take them on an estate or not. The best of what the field knows is not only for people who shoot.

What can sometimes feel unwelcoming is the culture, not the knowledge. And you do not have to accept one to benefit from the other. You can take what is useful and leave what does not sit with you. That is not picking and choosing to be difficult. That is learning like a grown-up.

LWDG members come from every background. Many will never work their dogs in a shooting context. That is completely fine. The understanding of breed instinct, energy management, and how to train with drive rather than against it applies to every single one of them.

Takeaway: The gundog world is not a monolith. Take the knowledge. You do not have to take everything that comes with it.

One Context Does Not Mean All Contexts

A dog who sits perfectly in the kitchen and explodes out of the car park is not taking the mick. Dogs do not generalise the way we assume they do. Every new environment, every new level of distraction, is a new lesson. Not a test of whether the old lesson worked.

When you understand this, you stop feeling let down when the training does not hold somewhere new, and you start proofing deliberately instead. You go back to the beginning in each new place, put in the work, and build from there. It is not a regression. It is just how dogs learn.

You have not taken them somewhere they are ignoring you. You have taken them somewhere they have not trained yet. Those are very different things.

Takeaway: Every time you go somewhere new, step back before you step forward. That is not a failure of your training. It is how you make the training actually stick.

Slow Is Not Behind

Some of the most capable working dogs I have ever seen were trained slowly, carefully, and without pressure to reach anyone else's timeline. The speed at which your dog learns is not a measure of your ability or theirs.

Rushing produces dogs who perform brilliantly in ideal conditions and fall apart in real ones. The beautiful behaviour on the training field disappears the moment something changes, because the foundation was not given enough time to become solid. The handler who resists the urge to push before something is genuinely solid is the one who ends up with a dog she can actually trust.

Slow is not behind. Slow is thorough. And thorough is what lasts.

Takeaway: If you are moving faster than your dog is ready for, you are not saving time. You are borrowing it.

The Dog in Front of You Is Already the Dog You Wanted

Not the finished version. Not the one with the solid recall and effortless lead walking you will have in two years. The one in front of you right now, who got it wrong on the walk this morning, whose training session went sideways on Tuesday, who insists on sitting on your lap on the floor at the end of the day.

Arthur does that. He is probably the biggest spaniel I have ever met, and he insists on sitting on me. It is not practical. It is soothing for both of us. That is relationship. That is what you are building in the ordinary moments, not just the training ones.

Ten years of watching women with working dogs has taught me this: the ones who get there are not the ones who found a shortcut. They are the ones who stayed with it and worked with the dog in front of them. Having a working breed makes you more patient, more creative, more innovative in your thinking, and better at problem solving. The dog you thought was going to be a challenge is the thing that makes you better.

Questions people ask about training working breeds as family pets

My dog is exhausted after two hours of exercise and still bounces off the walls at home. What am I doing wrong?

Nothing, and everything. The effort is there. The type of effort is the problem. High-adrenaline unstructured exercise builds stamina and arousal in working breeds. It does not drain them. Scent work, structured training, and calm decompression are what shift the dial. Add those alongside the walks, not instead of them, and you will start to see the difference.

My dog recalls perfectly at home and completely ignores me in the park. Is the training not working?

The training is working exactly where you have trained it. Dogs do not generalise automatically. The park is a new context with a completely different level of distraction and environmental pull. Go back to the beginning there. Start on the lead, build the habit in that environment, and give it time. The recall is not broken. It just has not been trained there yet.

I feel guilty every time I have to correct my dog. Am I being too harsh?

The guilt is normal, and it is worth examining. For most women handling working breeds, the instinct is not to overcorrect. It is to under-lead. A clear, consistent correction that your dog understands is not harsh. Scrambled signals that leave them guessing what you want are actually harder for them to live with. Clarity is a kindness.

My dog is two years old and still not reliable off lead. Should I be further along by now?

Whose timeline are you comparing to? Two years with a high-drive working breed is not a long time, particularly if there are gaps in the foundation or environments you have not proofed yet. Slow and solid will always outperform fast and patchy. Keep going. The reliability comes when the foundation is genuinely there, not when the calendar says it should be.

I do not intend to work my dog on a shoot. Is gundog training still relevant for me?

Yes, completely. The knowledge from the gundog world, how to work with drive rather than against it, how to build focus and steadiness in a high-energy breed, how to use breed instinct as a training tool rather than a problem to suppress, applies to your dog in daily life whether you ever go near a field or not. You do not have to use the knowledge in a shooting context for it to be enormously useful to you.

You Are Why This Exists

Ten years ago I was not trying to build a community. I was trying to make sense of a problem I was living through. And the more I looked, the more I saw it everywhere: women with brilliant high-drive dogs, doing everything they could find to do right, and still feeling like they were getting it wrong.

The problem was not them. It was never them. It was the gap between the dog they had and the guidance that existed for it.

If you are the woman who showed up after a session that went completely sideways, who asked the question she was worried sounded stupid, who chose to understand her dog instead of giving up on it, this exists because of you. You are what LWDG is for. And ten years on, that has not changed.

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