I was wondering if anyone could reccomend a good book for training a retriever. I am not interested in competions or anything like that, just to have a respectable hunting partner.
Welcome to the RTF jry.
Top of this page, the brown Mike Lardy Banner. Click and find the printed stuff, his volume 1 for $25 will kick your can down the road purty far.
Tom Dokken's Retriever Training : The Complete Guide to Developing Your Hunting Dog is right up your ally. This is what I am currently working on with my pup. It is very easy to understand, very well laid out and is 100% geared towards hunting. If you are into the "positive training" thing, Robert Milners Retriever Training: A Back-to-Basics Approach book may be of interest to you as well.
I start off with Mertens "Sound Beginnings' and Bill Hilmann's 'Training a Retriever Puppy' Everything else after I use the "Smartwork for retrievers" 1 & 2....these are idiot proof, just right for me!
I started training my first lab in July. Despite the Internet etc. I went to the library and checked out Richard Wolters "gun dog", "water dog" and "family dog". Even though they're fifty years old they started me out real well. I photocopied numerous pages until I was lucky enough to find them in a used book store for five bucks a piece. You can also still buy them at Amazon. I also found milner's gun dog. Good luck.
I found Tom Dokkens book to be ok. He uses more of the positive method than alot of others. The only thing that I questioned was how long he suggest you wait to introduce live birds.other than that it would be a very easy book to fallow.
I trained my first pup using Amy Daul's ten min retriever. Very stright forward and very easy to fallow can not say enough good things about it. Not many people ever suggest it either not sure why? Also like SmartWorks Evan has a good way of making advanced concepts more simple(for me at least).
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