The Check Cord

Going Pro: Preparing Your Pup and Yourself for Expert Trainers

- Alec Sparks

After interacting with numerous professional trainers for 36 years and training professionally for 32 years myself, I would like to take a look at why you might or might not consider using the services of a professional trainer.

The first thing I would advise you to do would be to take a serious, filter-free look at yourself. What are your expectations for your dog at the end of training? I have found that no matter the targeted training objectives, the less experienced an owner is the more important it will be to have the dog as advanced as possible in terms of the level of finished reliability. More experienced owners are generally able to be successful in continuing to advance and solidify trained behaviors that are not as fully developed.

Are you just looking for some foundational exposure to birds and gunfire and hope you have enough of a cooperative dog with proper instincts so that you could then hunt the dog successfully, or are you looking for a much more advanced dog that has solidified behaviors such as formalized change of direction on voice and whistle, reliable recall with voice and/or whistle, compliance around distractions, staunchness, steady to wing and shot and reasonable experience with training birds in realistic hunting conditions?