After a puppy has been well socialized and introduced to most of the things he or she will encounter then it may be time for training. Some dogs develop sooner than others. A good roundabout age for training would be in the 5 to 6 month time period so that when the obedience training is done the canine's adult teeth will be in and teaching the dog to hold and retrieve on command will be more productive. It is possible to have puppies at 9 weeks or even younger to sit and retrieve. I always say teach them to sit first but really first I like to see the puppy retrieve a rolled up sock a few times. Then I like to start tying them out a few times a week to get used to the leash. After more fun retrieving, we sample and see how the puppy responds to sitting. Once the dogs attention span will allow the teaching of the "sit" command then the first thing that we do is have the dog "sit" and give him a retrieve and lots of praise. The next aspect I like to focus on is "here". When the puppy(who should already know somewhat what it means) has a duck or a bumper in the mouth you find out how much he or she really knows what "here" means. This is fairly easy to remedy though with a check cord and some friendly coaxing, perhaps a treat....mainly just repititions. Feel free to contact me at
info@arkansasretrievertraining.com for training or more information. You may wonder what our price is? $575 per month includes training and boarding.