Separating Commands for Two Dogs

[SnowDog]

Hey everyone - I'm making good progress with my puppy program, but running into a slight issue. When I have my older lab and the pup out for a walk, and I want to sit just the older dog to "honor" a fun retrieve for the pup, how do I go about telling just him to sit with a whistle or command? Do I need to introduce a second whistle command just for the pup? Today I use one blast for sit and three for recall. Possibly use two blasts to sit the pup?

Cheers!
SD

[Special T]

People i know that hunt multiple dogs say their name first then the command... IDK how you would do it with a whistle.

[Stilly bay]

IMO your asking a lot of a pup and there is bound to be some confusion occurring.

I think it would just be best to keep it simple for everyone involved and if you want one dog to sit while the other performs just call out that particular dog's name followed with "SIT" then both could still be trained to sit on whistle, just not separately... Thats how I do it anyway.

I imagine if you really want to do this, an idea would be to train with two different sounding whistles. One dog trained to whistle A and the other to Whistle B... but that sounds like a real pain in the arse.

Im probably overlooking something super easy and simple for this.

[Stilly bay]

OK I got it. train your dogs to remote sit to their Ecollar's tone function.

[Happy Gilmore]

Running two dogs at the same time is advanced work. Pup needs one on one time. Send the dog on its name. Shouldnt need a recall whistle on a retrieve.

[AWS]

Stilly's idea of using a the tone on a collar is a good one.  One of my old dogs went deaf early and I taught her to Hup/Sit and face me with the vibration mode on a collar and from there she would take hand signals for retrieves.

It is suprising how much a dog uses their ears.  Hunting with her in the brush after she went deaf was a challenge for awhile, she was forever getting lost.  Slowly she learned to keep checking on me visually, whenever I'd see her start leaping in the air I'd wave my hat over my head and she'd head back in.  We hunted together for 14 yrs, four of them with her deaf.  She was one of the best, won a number of hunting competitions, first AWS to pass senior hunt test level in AKC spaniel hunt tests(too bad it was as a demonstration dog) and is the feature AWS in Barron's "The Sporting Spaniel Handbook".  She was a hunting machine, her ashes are buried next to our favorite duck blind so she'll never miss a day in the marsh again.

[Don Fischer]

To teach the second dog to honor, teach it to honor a situation. Start with a command and switch to the situation. I call out whoa, and both my dogs respond but, either come's on a dog on point and they will honor and I don't have to give any type of command.