One of the most important set of skills your retriever should learn is the ability to handle. To handle is to take hand signals from you that direct your dog to the bird. In order for your dog to handle, he must sit to the whistle. MUST. Sitting to the whistle means when the dog is searching for a bird at any distance from you, one whistle blast will make him stop, look at you and sit. He is then under your control and can take the appropriate hand signal to the area of the fall. It’s a beautiful thing.

To teach your dog to sit to the whistle, he must already sit and stay at your side on command. He also at least needs to understand the basics of ‘heel’ so if you have not yet spent any time on teaching heel, I suggest you do so before you move on.

Different trainers teach sit to the whistle in various ways. My process has worked for me so there is no reason it won’t work for you. Be creative and add some twists based on your dog and how he reacts to the lesson. This is another area where you should strive for your answer to ‘how good is good enough?’ to be as good as you can get.

Note: You should teach the basic heel before you teach sit to the whistle, and that instruction follows in the next entry in this series.