Last month a lovely new fox red lab puppy joined our little team of dogs. This is exciting for us as it’s the first lab in the current team of spaniels.

Her name is Ember and she comes from some good working parents who have a good spread of field trial champions in the 5 gen history with both parents working a large number of days in the season.

Ember settled in nicely in her nice pen and create setup in our dog room. We don’t kennel our dogs at the moment but we do always crate train them for around a year. She does like to scream when she needs the toilet and mostly understands that outside is the place to go.

Working from home I get to spend a lot of time with her but I do like to leave her for at least one 3 or 4 hour block and a few shorter ones. She wakes up at 7 – 7.30 and doesn’t wake during the night (except the first 3 days).

Over the first few weeks we really only work on building a good bond and some very simple tasks.

Sit – she now will sit on cue; this was initially captured by luring her into the sit but she moved on from needing a lure very quickly.

Recall – at the moment it’s all association, capturing her running towards us with the whistle or a verbal cue.

Steadiness – the only steadiness we do with her is with her food bowl and coming out of her pen. Both of these have made good progress. She is cued to sit and I start to open the pen door, if she gets up it closes again until I’m happy it’s open enough before giving her an ok to come out. This is done in a similar way with the food bowl, gradually trying to put it down. If she moves it comes back up.

Retrieving – we noticed after the first couple of days that it was clear she loves to retrieve. Starting off we used a fun looking toy and she would run right out and bring it back, jumping on my lap for a fuss. We have since moved on using the little puppy dummies and a puppy Dokken plus she has even dragged some of the bigger dogs dummies back with lots of determination.

Place board – so far she has had her dinner stood on a place board a few times, it doesn’t yet mean anything to her we are just making it a happy place to be.

Hunt whistle – a little exercise the gundog app, blowing the hunt whistle when she is eating her food and I also like to hide or scatter feed some food and will add the hunt whistle whenever she is close.

That’s all with the training so far, she does also come out to gundog training in the truck and travels very nicely, in a crate on the back seats at the moment, and sleeps for around 5hrs with a couple of toilet breaks while we work with clients.

Next steps for this little one I think will be starting to associate the stop whistle as she sits and work more on recall and her following us round the garden to build the eventual heel work.