# Sugarfoot learning the retrieve



## Quossum (Mar 18, 2011)

Poodles are "natural" retrievers, and Sugarfoot is no exception. He'll chase and bring back a ball or toy promptly (usually promptly...there have been some teenage moments) and of course has been trained in many other ways as we build our Agility foundation.

Dog show Obedience is a very different type of sport from Agility, and one of the exercises in the Open class (second hardest class, after Novice and before Utility) is the Retrieve. The dog has to bring back a dumbbell. These are made of wood or plastic, and teaching a dog to retrieve one properly (all sorts of criteria are involved in earning a perfect score) can be a long process. Some dogs don't like to pick up items in their mouths at all, and that makes training them a real challenge!

I found my old Obedience dumbbell, and decided to go out in the yard with Sugar and see what he thought of it. I'm not really training for Obedience, but I wanted to see how quickly he'd figure out what was going on, just from playing with toys before and being generally a curious boy and a willing worker.

So, here you go! Mind you, this is a dog who has *never* seen an Obedience dumbbell before--this was our very first session with it.






Now, for comparison, here is how the Retrieve looks in the ring. This is Fonzi, an *amazing* working spoo; her owner has lots of good videos to watch if you enjoy this little snippet of her in the ring.






Sugar's not THERE yet...but I was blown away by how quickly he caught on and how willing he was to play with this strange and brand new object. The beginning of a formal retrieve is already there!

Hope you enjoyed seeing a little bit of training in action!

--Q


----------

