You or something stated it
“It does not just happen out of the blue”
Typically all responses and end result(s) are conditioned responses that were their taught or has some type of their natural instinct coming to light.
Condition Response training starts the minute you pick up your bird dog. You and family members are imprinting our dog’s environment and what responses/acknowledgements you want without even knowing it, some good and some not so good.
Why does my dog do that? A bird dogs natural drive will get them into all kinds of interesting situations and outcomes when you are training or hunting. Sometimes not the outcome we predicted or want but instead you might wonder why did that just happen.
How do you fix or address a bird dog that will not give you a bird to hand or worse devours the bird.
Example of a dog not giving up their bird and what we believe was the root cause.
As a pup it was conditioned (unknowingly) to run away from anyone trying to grab something out of it’s mouth. Forcing the dog to drop it’s head, moving it’s head away from an approaching hand or just run and make it a game. BAD NEWS!… fast forward. With a bird in mouth any movement towards the dog or showing a hand would cause the dog to run away and simply eat it -vs- giving it up. NOW that’s a problem! but it was imprinted early and now you see the conditioned response coming thru; running away from anyone trying to take something/anything away from it.
If you don’t want a dog to have a hard mouth don’t play tug-a-war, think of some other areas to help imprint a soft mouth.
AZPointingDog LLC