In this video I’m starting to see if treacle can distinguish which dummy I’m asking her to collect when given the commands and handle signals for each dummy.

As time goes on and treacle becomes more confident I will start to place the dummies back from where she has collected them from for further distraction.

At this time we don’t want to add any further distraction as the activity is already hard enough.

Treacle’s direction training is starting to come together, however, you can see as she becomes more focused I have to pay more attention to her training and less to the video recording!

You will see at 4:06 on the video I’ve asked treacle to sit and stay whilst I retrieve a dummy. You will see that treacle comes to me instead of staying where I left her. Look at my body language, when I go to pick up the dummy my body language is moving away from Treacle moving downwards the same as I would if I were calling her to heal.

I repeat the exercise making my body language more clear leading to success.

So did treacle do something wrong or did my body language ask her to do something I didn’t want??

When we train we need to remember most dogs just aim to please us and if our dogs do something wrong we need to analyse it to make sure we gave all the right commands verbally and physically.

As you will see Treacle seems to be back on track and more fluent in her ability in this video.

Treacle looks more focused is this training session but I also have to be very aware of what she is doing and how she is feeling, my body language to Treacle is key for success.

Yesterday I took Treacle back out to the training field to see if the activity I had been doing with her food bowl to understand directions with my hands had transferred to when being asked to retrieve.

I had been activating treacle at feeding time but since the last video she has also had a lot of free time playing with older dogs.

As you will see in the video when treacle is under control on the lead she is willing but when she gets free she looks to play and explore.

This is normal behaviour for all young dogs but when training we need to utilise all there energy in the right direction.

Over the next 10 days I will take Treacle out every 2 -3 days to run through the same training activities trying to bring more focus to me making her understand we are a partnership and need each other!

Today I have taken Treacle back out training to see if she’s progressed since her adult teeth have started to come through.

In the last video Treacle was playing and mouthing the dummies to comfort herself due to teething. This is something we cant stop and is normal for all puppies, however its a mentality I don’t want to encourage when retrieveing.

Treacle has had nearly 3 weeks away from training so I was unsure on what she had to offer, but on a plus side we would get to see how well she has digested training so far!

Treacle is now progressing really well but i now want her to learn the difference between free time and training.

This is important so young dogs can relax, grow and absorb their training.

This was the first time i have tried to enforce the stay command when asking Treacle to retrieve an object for me.

In this video with Treacle I’m continuing to teach her to stay and wait for her dinner.

However i now start to introduce the command I am wanting to use for her to pick up a retriever, which is “Go Back”.

As you can see from my video diary with Treacle I always take my time, i don’t look to rush anything hoping for success!

When introducing something new like “Go back” i always return to a training section which will help release the pressure of training, in this case back to dinner time!