"Some people want their dogs to sit in front to deliver," he said. "I can train them that way. Others want their dogs to sit on either the right or left side, perhaps first going around behind them. I can train them that way, too. Personally, I prefer to have a dog come in to my left, turn beside me, and sit on my left side. That facilitates setting him up for the next retrieve.

Randall Polley

"Well-bred retrievers retrieve naturally," Randy said, "but many of them have faulty deliveries. Some don't bring the bird all the way in, like if they drop it on shore to shake water from their coats and then don't pick it back up again. Others develop a bad habit of dropping the bird at your feet, or even a few feet away.

"Force-fetch solves those delivery problems very nicely for me. But I wouldn't recommend it for a retriever that doesn't retrieve naturally. Such a dog won't ever amount to much, so why waste all that time on him?"

In force-fetch, Randy teaches the dog to hold, carry, reach for, and pick up a dummy or bird on the command "Take" (which suggests he has a strong obedience background), and to release it on the command "Give."

"More recently," he said, "I've been using 'Thank you' as a release command. I read somewhere about someone using that and I liked it, so I've started using it myself."

Thoughts On Force-Fetch Don't miss tips for your pointer, here, or your spaniel, here.

Randy doesn't use a table. He does it the old-fashioned way, on the ground, which can be tiring, but which encourages a person to keep each session short. He uses the lip-pinch force method. He starts with a small plastic dummy, then introduces various other retrieving dummies, and finishes with dead birds.

His only prerequisite is that the dog has been obedience-trained. Once that is done, he will force-fetch the animal whenever it begins to have a delivery problem in regular field work. When this happens, he discontinues field work while force-fetching the dog, which usually takes about six weeks, with two or three sessions a day. When he's finished the dog delivers very reliably.