Labrador Retriever Nails 500 Yard Retrieve, Hunting Super Dog Possibilities!

Labrador Retrievers are excellent dogs!  Labs make fantastic house and family dogs as well as incredibly versatile Hunting Dogs.  Labrador Retrievers have been at the top of my “list of favorite dogs” since I was 16 years old.  I have trained well over 500 dogs in my lifetime, as my past career was a professional dog trainer, and I have grown to love them more and more over the years.

In the Youtube video below, (You can subscribe to my YouTube channel by clicking here), you will see my current dog Roxy.  She has honestly been the most amazingly easy to train dog I have ever worked with.  She is the absolutely perfect combination of dominant and submissive.  I just tell her “No” once and she listens- 95% of the time, no leash or collar necessary.  She even listens well for my kids and my wife.  The interesting thing is that we have hardly ever used a collar and leash to train.  She is just th eperfect combination of “wants to please” and “submissive”  that you could ask for.  What I mean is that if you do ask her to do something and she doesn’t listen the first time- which for her is rare- just a hint of sternness (I think I just made up a word!) and she complies without rolling over on her belly and peeing herself.  She is very confident yet very compliant.  Truly unlike ANY other dog I have ever seen or worked with.

I am curious to see how she will do with more advanced training like handling, and force fetching, but feel very confident that If I properly adjust the degree of my reprimands to meet her level of learning she will do just an excellent job and turn out to be an amazing hunting and competition dog as well.

Because I am so busy these days, with the kids and with my Real Estate career and my Marketing Consultation Business, I do not get out to hunt or train as much as I used to back when I used to do guided hunts, manage the hunting club or host the television show.  Therefore I was blown away by the degree of her instinct when we took her to a field to do long marked retrieves for the first time.  Previous to this trip we had done a lot of fun retrieving around the house, of course, like any Labrador Retriever she is relentless in trying to get us to play fetch with her! Before the trip in the video we had only been out to a ball field on 3 seperate occassions to work on 50 to 100 yard marked retrieves.

I had a hunch that she was going to be an amazingly instinctive marking dog- just like her bloodlines had indicated she might be, so I set up the first throw at 300 yards.  Normally, I would have just slowly worked back to long retrieves, over a period of many training sessions, like you have to do with most dogs, but I believed she was different!  To my pleasure and amazement she nailed a 300, 400 and 500 yard retrieve on right after the other!  For any of you who know dogs, that is just about unheard of except in the rare case of “instinctively exceptional” pinpoint, marking ability. (Marking is the act of watching a bird or training dummy fall and then remembering the exact location of where it fell and running straight to it to pick it up without really stopping and using their nose to “Hunt for it”).

Well, enough of my chatter, check out the video of her 400 and 500 yard retrieves and leave a comment on what you think of her instinct!  Feel free to bookmark and share on twitter or use the video in one of your blogs if you’d like!  Happy Hunting!

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Tags: dog, dog training, Hunting, instinct, labrador Retriever, mark, retrieves, retrieving