Everyone me Raya, a Golden Retriever who’s been coming for private lessons to work on her hunt and obedience skills.
Her owners acquired her at about 8 months old and have hopes of making her a hunting dog as well as a beloved family pet.
She can be a bit shy by nature so the first lesson was mostly to let her get to know me and evaluate her obedience skills and see what her retrieve drive was like. It was a big transition for her into the new home so I didn’t expect too much from her really. Overall she is a nice dog and shows a lot of promise, but we are taking it slow with her hunt wise. We went back to some puppy basics to make sure all bases were covered and to give her new owners a good foundation with her.
I gave her owners some homework to build her drive up with retrieving games. I rather have a dog fetch crazy before adding too many rules. But that also depends on the dog too. We did another lesson and she was much improved so on the third lesson I decided to get some quail for her. I wanted to see what she did with feathers. As the pictures show she loved it. And she showed boldness and curiosity from the start. A very good sign!
The first quail I let her chase around and retrieve and get excited about. You always want the pup wanting more with this hunt stuff. And it should all be kept as positive as possible to build that desire.
After some chasing we decided to have her sit and wait as I went and used a blank gun to simulate it being shot and let her retrieve it. She got even more excited.
You can see she was quite proud of her birds. Such a fun lesson with this girl, I love being part of building a dogs love for the game. We will keep going slow and steady and let her determine when she is ready for us to get more serious with her and ask more of her . I’m looking forward to getting her out on more birds in the fall hopefully . Maybe her and Oakley can work a field together one day.