Of all the dogs and in particular Golden Retrievers aka Swamp Collies that we’ve had Ben was, by a long shot, the most capable when it came to response to whistle commands and retrieving.
His genes must have been from a good line of working gun dogs I think.
He just enjoyed the whole training game so much and it was a pleasure to have had the opportunity to work with such a good dog. I’m sure if I had told him to sit in the middle of the road and wait for a bus to come he would have done it for me!
Ben didn’t always get it right though!
I had got Ben to the point that I could leave him sitting at the edge of one field and I could walk off to in to the next field and go behind hedgerows where he couldn’t see me. He wouldn’t budge from where he’d been told to sit. He would focus intently on the general area where he last saw me and keep sniffing the air for my scent.
We’d already been doing partial recalls – I would call him in then when he was about half way whistle him to stop and sit so this time I thought we would do a straight run in.
I had hidden myself in the hedgerow and could actually no longer see Ben but I knew he would be where I had left him. So we were all set and I whistled him to come in. The next thing I saw was Ben come flying like a missile through a gap in the hedgerow about 15 to 20 yards away from me and keep on going across the field! I was wondering if he had spotted a fox or something and forgotten what he was meant to be doing! I was about to whistle him to stop when at about half way across the field he suddenly stopped himself and started looking round.
I decided to keep quiet and hidden to see what happened!
Ben started to circle and I could see he was very quickly working out what was going on and it wasn’t very long before he had latched on to my scent and was hurtling towards where I was hiding. He was ecstatic when he found me licking and pawing me tail wagging frantically – he was bouncing with excitement and adrenalin.
If dogs get embarrassed then I’m pretty sure he was that day.
He was so stoked up with excitement I had to get him running round in those totally mad high speed circles dogs do till he’d burnt it out.
I reckon what had happened was the wind must have been behind him while he was sitting waiting and he’d lost the scent. In his keenness to find me he had just aimed for the general area where he thought I was. As he hadn’t been following a scent trail on the ground it was only after he had come through the hedgerow that he started to pick up my scent on the wind so by time he had worked out things weren’t quite right he was half way across the field.
I so wish that back then we had the mobile phones we now all have as, it would have been a superb video to have had in our collection but sadly back then we had bricks that struggled to take a half decent still shot.
It still makes me smile when I think about Ben that day 😂
