Gun Dog Forum
July-August 2007

Force-Fetch or Natural Retrieve?
By Larry Brown

xcept for those of us who own both a pointing dog and a flusher or retriever and use them as a team, most want their pointing dogs to retrieve. There are two schools of thought when it comes to retrieving. One is that all hunting dogs – including pointing dogs – ought to be taught via the “trained retrieve” or “force-fetch” method.

The other is that most hunting dogs, including the breeds that point, have strong natural retrieving instincts. If you work to enhance those instincts from the time the dog is a pup, chances are very good your dog will be a good retriever without resorting to force-fetch.

I should add right here that if you’re talking to retriever people who trial their dogs, it’s not an either/or proposition. Because all retrievers are expected to retrieve well, their trials center more around how the dog retrieves rather than whether it retrieves. And force-fetch is the primary way to get the kind of retrieving work demanded in trials. Likewise, people running their dogs in the upper levels of NAVHDA testing (and maybe even in AKC hunt tests and NSTRA trials) are also very inclined to force-fetch their dogs because of the retrieving requirements in those events.

But if you’re only going to hunt and all you want is an animal that brings you birds reliably (which is quite a bit, when you stop to think about it), then depending on your dog, you may very well have a choice in training methods.

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