I love dogs, but I’m not a dog trainer. In fact, I have no formal training in any area of animal care or behaviour. As the Founder of The Ladies Working Dog Group, I spend a large percentage of time talking to both dog owners, and dog trainers. It’s a great job and it’s helped me learn so much about the important role gundog trainers play.

Let me teach you some things about what gundog trainers do,  and how you can use them to help you and your dog’s relationship flourish.

There is a lot to know and do as a pet parent, and there are many ways to help your dog be happy and healthy – from feeding them well to walking them often enough for their needs, to worming, and to knowing basic pet first aid, it’s a lot to take on.

And then there’s what we call “training”, which is teaching your dog how to behave appropriately in different situations so they’re happier as well as safer around others who might not appreciate their excitement!

On top of this general dog training, is the need for a gundog to understand far more when it comes to them carrying out a working role. So whether you want to learn more about this before you buy a gundog, or if you need some help with training a gundog breed, let’s discuss how a gundog trainer can help.

A gundog trainer helps you understand the basics of training a working dog

The basics of how to train a working dog can be tough, especially when the dog has forgotten he is meant to be listening to the owner and has decided to become self-employed instead!

A gundog trainer will get you started with training your new pup or help you with an older dog. Hiring someone who has experience in teaching a dog – like a trainer –  is going to help things go much smoother.

They also teach you how to interact with your pet gundog

Working dogs have a huge amount of energy physically, and a massive desire to be engaged mentally. Your trainer will teach you basic commands so that you can control these areas like sit, stay and come. They will also teach you how to focus your dog and how to meet their needs in a relationship-building way.

As your skills develop, your trainer will encourage you to take on more technical cues and they will help you to have lots of fun whilst you learn.

Your trainer will help you set up an appropriate schedule for your pup’s training that fits into your lifestyle.

Dog training requires you to be consistent. That can sometimes be tricky around family life, but your gundog trainer will help teach you how to do this. They help you understand how each dog differs and what kind can best suit your needs for that particular breed or type. Gundog trainers will teach you how to help a gundog breed happy live in a family home, while still being able to go out and do a working day on an estate.

Your trainer will work with both dogs and humans to make sure everyone is on the same page.

He or she can help you be more aware of your dog’s behaviour, as well as how they interact within a group setting so that you can train your dog to behave appropriately in a range of different settings and situations. They will teach you what you need to do to facilitate this as well.

Trainers are more than just teachers – they’re mentors too!

I am a trainer, not of dogs, but of people. I have been training people in mindset coaching for over ten years now. Here’s what you need to know about being any kind of trainer…

Trainers aren’t only focused on teaching skills; these professionals also provide practical advice from personal experiences with difficult topics such as anger management with your dog, through to ways to teach both you and your dog to switch off,  because we understand how hard training can be sometimes, especially when there isn’t enough space left inside ourselves anymore to go forward alone.

Your gundog trainer will teach you about how to be a better-behaved handler, and how not to be too hard on yourself. You’ll also learn about canine behaviour well as other skills such as grooming, nutrition, and health care during these sessions.

A gundog trainer is responsible for the training of a hunting dog.

Gundog Trainers work with you to teach your dog what behaviours are appropriate in different situations, often showing patience when it’s necessary, and understanding that each dog learns these skills slowly through repetition over time so they can remember them later on.

You may never intend on actually working your gundog, but it is important to still use the skills as it helps keep your dogs mentally stimulated and happy.

They teach the dogs how to hunt and retrieve games, and will teach you how to work your dog in the field if that is something you want to do.

Hunting dogs have been trained since ancient times to find the game and track it down with their noses until they could bring home an animal’s carcass.  The first step in moving on from a pet gundog used to training with dummies onto a working dog is to teach them what kind of game will be hunting or retrieving.

Working with a cold or warm game isn’t for everyone, and you can still train a remarkable gundog without it ever needing to touch a dead animal. However, if you want to go onto an estate a gundog trainer can help you to teach your dog to do this successfully.

They do so much more…

The LWDG Group and Featured Gundog Training Experts do so much to help all our group members. They check our pages daily, posting comments to help where they can, and producing our masterclasses, podcasts, and videos. They not only look after their own clients, but they help all of the community learn and grow. They do all the above and so much more! The best trainers not only care about their customers but also about the way gundogs are perceived by everyone.

We hope reading this post you’ve taken a few moments to think about what your dog training needs might be and how Gundog trainers can help. They will provide the knowledge and support that their many years of experience have given them and will also bring you the tools needed to train your dogs in order for you to succeed.

If any of this sounds like it could be helpful for you you can ask in our group for names of recommended trainers in your area. If there is anything else we can do to help you train your gundog please let us know!

Let us know if you have worked with a gundog trainer and how it helped you?

How do I know when my dog ‘knows’ something? This is the $1,000,000 question.

The answer to this question then dictates how we respond to our dogs both in a teaching or training sense and also in an emotional sense.

If we assume that our dog ‘knows’ a behaviour and our dog does not respond correctly, then we can become frustrated or disappointed that our dog has ‘failed’ or assume that our dog has deliberately chosen not to do what we have asked of them.

A wise person once said,“We expect too much from our dogs and not enough from ourselves”.

For what it’s worth, these are my thoughts on knowing when a dog ‘knows’ a behaviour.

I like to think of working with my gundog as a conversation.  I ask a question in the form of some sort of training exercise or set up and then let the dog answer the question with either getting things correct or making an error.  Errors are just information on the state of learning; where the dog is in their understanding of what is being asked.

I look at errors as holes in my dog’s learning which I need to find a way to ‘fill’ by doing more teaching in that area.

Principle 1 – Dog’s are very situation-specific with what they learn, they have to learn to generalise behaviours.

In practice, this means that the slightest change in the environment can interfere with a dog’s ability to understand what it is that you want from them.  As you train the same behaviour in 100’s different places with 100’s of successful repetitions, then a dog will begin to generalise a behaviour.

The more educated a dog is, the quicker it can generalise a behaviour as they learn the life skill of generalising.

I am more surprised when behaviour does work in a new situation than if it doesn’t.

Questions to ask ourselves when a dog makes an error: –

• Have I trained this behaviour in this location under this specific set of conditions?

• If the location is the same, are the weather conditions the same, dry still weather is low scent conditions, damp windy weather is high scent conditions?

• Are the distractions the same, different people, different dogs, additional wildlife?

• Is my dog cognitive right now or is he in the reaction part of his brain?

The answers to these questions will then affect how we need to proceed to help our dogs to give the correct answer to the question that we have asked, in the form of the exercise that we have given them to do.

We have to find a way to help them understand in that situation.

Principle 2 – Dogs do what historically has worked best for them.

This raises the question of motivation.  If my dog understands what is being asked of him, and still chooses to do something different then the value in doing what I asked is not sufficient.

An example of this is my GWP, I never managed to find something that was sufficiently motivating for her to choose to recall away from hunting game.  As a result, I managed her on a long line and harness in the areas that I knew would be an issue, and she free-ran only in areas where I knew she could make correct decisions about the recall.

I learned a valuable lesson from that gundog and now work really hard with all my pups to create the ultimate reinforcer that is more valuable to them than hunting game or anything else.

Principle 3 – 80% or above, the success rate in a given situation with ‘fluency’ is my criteria that my dog ‘knows’ something.

Dogs are not machines and they will make mistakes sometimes, as we all do.  However, if my dog has an 8/10 success rate, I would say that they have a good grasp of what is being asked.  In this article, I define fluency as the ability to quickly repeat the cue multiple times with no deterioration in the quality of response or increase in latency (time to respond from when the cue is given).

Principle 4 – Human error, did I ask the dog the right question or give him the right information?

I heard about some research that has been done looking at the number of errors a dog makes compared to the number of errors a handler makes in a training session.  It turns out that the dogs made four or five times fewer errors than the average handler (from what I can remember).

This is a very important question to keep asking ourselves.  Videoing our training sessions can be very enlightening.  Quite often what we think we are doing; is not what we are actually doing!  We can create confusion in our dog, and not understand why.  Seeing what is we are actually doing, can clear up many training issues, by showing us what we need to change.  This can either be in the way we handle or how we communicate with our dog.

How does this help?

Since I have taken this approach to errors that occur in a teaching or training session, it has helped me to be able to see why my dog wasn’t able to give me the correct answer, which, in turn, has helped to reduce my frustration during working with my dog.

The first processes that I go through when faced with an error are checking in my mind, does my dog understand what I am asking, and is he motivated to do the behaviour.

Once I have recognised the main source of the error, either understanding or motivation, or sometimes both, then I can look at ways to fix it.

When the error is caused by a lack of understanding I look at how I can break the problem down into smaller chunks.  See the example below.

An example – 

My dog is steady at home with one other familiar dog but can’t manage to be steady in a group situation in a different environment.

I would split that down in to stages, only progressing when I get 8/10 success rate

1. Work on steadiness at home with one unfamiliar dogs
2. Work on steadiness at home with two unfamiliar dogs
3. Work on steadiness at home with three unfamiliar dogs
4. Work on steadiness at home with four unfamiliar dogs
5. Go to the different environment and work on cue discrimination, stay, retrieve, plus other cues as an only dog.
6. Work on steadiness in the new environment with one familiar dog
7. Work on steadiness in the new environment with one unfamiliar dog
8. Work on steadiness in the new environment with two unfamiliar dogs
9. Work on steadiness in the new environment with three unfamiliar dogs
10. Work on steadiness in the new environment with four unfamiliar dogs

I could also split these sections down further if my dog was still making errors.

When the error is caused by a lack of motivation then I will use management to prevent my dog from self-reinforcing in the short term and go back to basics and build better motivators for that dog.  When looking at creating better motivators I start in a very low challenge environment and then work back up to the problem environment.

If my dog looks ’guilty’, does this mean that he understands that he did the wrong thing?

Probably not, is the short answer to that question.

There have been studies done observing dogs’ reactions to situations looking at exactly this question.

A dog was left in a room with a piece of food and told to leave it, the owner then left the room for a short period of time.  They were told to either act happy or cross when they returned regardless of whether the dog had eaten the food or not.

What they found was the dog reacted positively if the owner came back in happy and in a ‘guilty’ way, when the owner came back in the acting cross, regardless of whether or not they had eaten the food.

The dogs were responding to the owner’s body language rather than the situation.

When dogs sense conflict building, they will generally try to appease and diffuse the situation.  Unfortunately for dogs, this behaviour has been labelled as ‘acting guilty’.  The more that the dog tries to appease the owner, the crosser the owner becomes, as they think that the dog is acknowledging wrong doing.  In actual fact, the dog is trying to say please stop being cross.

Dogs are very good at picking up when we are less than impressed.  For some sensitive individuals, indications as slight as a bit of a tut under your breath or a sigh can be enough for them to realise that something is wrong.  Not necessarily what or why something is wrong, but that there is something wrong.

If we look cross when the dog returns to us the chances are that he will sense something is wrong and display some sort of appeasement or displacement behaviour.  What that behaviour is, depends upon the dog’s personality and the level of ‘agro’ being displayed by the handler.

These behaviours can be as extreme as belly crawling, urinating, or rolling on his back.  It could be much more subtle, tail down lower than normal, hindquarters dropped slightly, turning his head sideways onto you, ‘smiling’- where he pulls his lips back in a submissive grin.  It could also be ‘crazy behaviours, having a fit of the zoomies, or playing keep away.

Videoing also helps us to see the really subtle signs of disapproval that we give out and how this affects our dog’s behaviour.

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