You can sharpen up your dog's heeling with mild corrections, like a few tugs on the lead.

If you've been training your retriever regularly, averaging twice a week or more all spring and summer, he shouldn't need a special pre-hunting tune-up. Just keep doing what you've been doing. However, if you've allowed Mallard-Muncher to lie around most of the time while you coached little league baseball or hauled in huge fish, he's ripe for a pre-season tune-up. You need to get him in shape, and refresh his memory relative to the duties of his noble calling.

For information on getting him into proper condition, read "Pro Tips" in this issue, which covers that subject thoroughly. But for some thoughts on how to remind him of his responsibilities as a hunting dog, continue reading here.

What Not To Do
If you've waited this long, you don't have much time for a tune-up. Even so, you shouldn't panic and rush into whatever level of advanced training M-M has previously attained. No tricky multiple marks. No "into the valley of death" blind retrieves. You're not cramming for an exam. You're simply trying to re-awaken M-M's most basic hunting skills.

If you give him challenging tests, he will fail quite often, so you'll correct him quite often. He'll get down on both himself and you. You'll get angry at both him and yourself. When you finally do get to go hunting, instead of working together as a team, you'll be at cross-purposes too much of the time.

Your Attitude
First, you need to adjust your own attitude and expectations. You can't blame M-M for his lack of recent training. No matter how valid your reasons for not training regularly were, you are the fall guy here. Therefore, you shouldn't start out dreaming about the wonder dog you would like him to be on opening day, or even the semi-wonder dog he may have been in the past.

Starting the training process this late, neither of the above is a feasible goal. If you attempt to cram in that level of training into such a short time, you'll do more harm than good. If you'd like him to be at that level next year, plan now to start training him early next spring.

Right now, consider only where he is today, and then estimate where you can reasonably expect to take him by opening day. Dogs lose their training rather rapidly when not worked regularly. An old office joke goes as follows: "The boss doesn't allow graduates of such-and-such a college to take coffee breaks because it takes too long to re-train them!" Retrievers are somewhat like that, too.

In this pre-season tune-up, you want not only to refresh M-M's training as much as possible, but perhaps more importantly you want to build his self-confidence and re-establish his rapport with you. You can't accomplish these latter two with predominantly negative training. You can't correct a dog into believing in himself. Nor can you correct him into bonding with you.

Ergo, this tune-up must be mostly positive. M-M should succeed most of the time. And you should praise him when he does.

Basic Obedience
In every training session, you should include a few minutes working on the basic obedience commands: Heel, Come, Sit, Stay, Kennel, and Down. Through these you establish, maintain and re-establish (as necessary) basic control. The dog that gets sloppy in his responses to those obedience commands will get sloppy in other areas of training.