The championship renewal at Pine Island Wildlife Area – Portage, WI – became a reality this year under the National Bird Hunters Association (NBHA). We would like to thank the NBHA and all their sponsors; Purina, Tri-Tronics, Christie Enterprises and Gun Dog Supply. Without their continued support, trials like ours would not be a success.

As we all know, the weather in Wisconsin, during the first week in April can include snow, rain, sleet, humidity, as well beautiful sunshine. This year we were truly blessed with crisp mornings (lows in the 30’s) and sunny afternoons (highs in the upper 50’s). It was perfect for walking, running dogs and riding horses.

Judges for this renewal were Rod Lein of Chippewa Falls, WI and Bert Benshoof of Roseville, MN. Both of these men understand what it takes to name a champion and what to look for in a classy shooting dog. They have judged across the country from Kentucky through the upper Midwest. We thank them dearly for keeping a watchful eye on all 32 dogs who vied for the title. We also appreciated having Rod’s nephew here from Los Angeles. He helped wrangle horses, plant birds and lend a helpful hand whenever it was needed. Even though he thought it was a bit cold compared to his hometown, he said he would love to come back…and we would love to have you! Before Bert arrived at the trial he stopped off and dropped a few lines in the river, thus providing fresh walleye for Thursday’s fish fry!

The Winners
With nearly one-third of the entries making it around the course, the judges had a handful that elevated themselves above the rest. The judges named Dale Creek Rail (Waite), a seven year old orange and white male pointer, as the 2012 NBHA Northeast Regional Champion. Rail ran in the 5th brace and exhibited a hard driving, forward race, accentuated with two stylish finds (at 35 and 42) with all in order. He finished the hour going away and strong to the front. Rail was also last year’s NBHA Northeast Regional Classic winner…he seems to have picked up right where he left off! The Runner-Up Champion went to Romeo’s Attitude (Waite), a nine year old, liver and white male pointer. Jessie ran in the 15th (second to last) brace of the stake and went on a bird finding spree, tallying a total of five finds (at 8, 15, 26, 35 and 60+). His third find was one of those body swapping types. Jessie last seen at 59:30 and was found to the front, after time pointing his fifth bird. Waite elected to complete the find and finished the work with all in order. Jessie’s ground application may not have been as far reaching as the Champion but he covered a lot of ground, and finding birds where many others did not.

Two other dogs gave Rail and Jessie a run for the title. All that Jazz Jasmine (DuVall) and Royal Rock Mr. Thumper (Daniels) were recognized, and highly commended by the judges, as dogs in consideration to the winners. Thumper finished the hour with four very stylish finds (at 9, 31, 43 and 46). Jasmine had two beautiful finds (at 9 and 20), one late nonproductive (at 52), she finished strong to the front. Both Jasmine and Thumper were strong contenders for the championship.

Derby
The accompanying Derby stake brought 12 contenders to the line. Taking the top honor was Ramblin River Crimson Reed (Donze), a powerful male Viszla with a strong, flashy and forward race. Second place went to Creek’s Thata Man Jack (Bazen) a male pointer, with a strong race and a nice finish. Rounding out the placements was Winlkeman’s Little Sugar (DuVall), Abby a female pointer, had a big break away and a nice find at the end of the brace. All three of these young dogs exhibited powerful ground application and have the potential to be fine shooting dogs. Many of the derbies laid down nice races and others had bird work. We thank all the derby handlers and owners for participating in our accompanying stake.

As the Chairman I would like to personally thank professionals Buck Daniels and Tom Waite for bringing their solid string of entries. I would also like to thank the numerous amateurs that supported this championship, some came from south central Illinois and we thank you all! And finally, a heartfelt thanks goes to all the Twelve O’clock Field Trial Club members who were there to help throughout the week…you made it a great success, and I could NOT have done it without you, thank you!

Rochester - The night was clear, the breeze was gentle and, except for a near-full moon that illuminated the landscape a little more than the average raccoon might like, it was a perfect night for a hunt.

I met up with a group of hunters that assembled at Tom Waite’s Racine County property one recent evening before the raccoon season ended on Thursday.  The party included Tom Waite of Wind Lake; Craig Meyer of Greendale; Mark Utech and his son, Max, both of Rochester, and Max Gibson of Oak Creek.  But the stars of the show, as always in these matters, were the dogs.

Gibson, who is 64, has more than 40 years experience hunting and training raccoon dogs, including several that were champions in national competitions.  This night, he brought along three of his dogs:  Dozer, a blue tick hound; Sally, a Walker hound; and Amy, a mountain cur.  “This is the greatest sport in the world,” Gibson told me as he leashed the dog and walked them from his truck to the edge of a field of corn stubble.  “You get plenty of fresh air and exercise.”

The basics of the hunt are simple.  You hunt at night because that’s when raccoons are out feeding.  You find an area with food and habitat.  In this case, we had corn fields lined with groves of oak trees where raccoons like to den.  To get started, you turn the dogs loose and follow them.  When they disappear, you pause and listen.  The hounds will let you know what’s going on.  When a hound first picks up the scent of a raccoon, it lets out a long, mournful-sounding howl called a bawl which continues and intensifies along with the pursuit.

Speed to burn

Each dog’s voice is unique, Dozer, a big male, has a full, deep bawl, while Sally’s howling is higher-pitched.   And then there was Amy, who remained silent till the very end of the chase.  “The thing that’s unique about a mountain cur is they never bark on a track,” Tom Waite explained. “They only bark at the tree.”

Gibson called the cur a “meat dog,” explaining that the little bob-tailed dogs were often used in the south to hunt raccoons, opossums and squirrels for the stew pot.  “A good coon dog is fast on the track,” said Tom Waite, who is also a dog trainer, “Any time you give a raccoon a chance, he’ll make it to a den tree.  Once they go into a den, there’s no way to get them.”  But when caught off guard, a raccoon will climb the nearest tree to get away from the dogs.

When a hound trees a raccoon, the bawling changes to short, excited barks called “chops.”  “That’s your alarm call that they’ve got a treed raccoon,” Waite said.  When we heard the dogs chopping, we picked up the pace and made our way, as fast as we could, across the fields and through the woods.  The sounds of the dogs eventually led us into a hardwood thicket on the far end of Waite’s property where Dozer, Sally and Amy were barking at the base of a tree.

Safety comes first

After we found the raccoon in our flashlight beams, we leashed the dogs and pulled them out of the way while Tom Waite loaded his 22 caliber rifle.  “For safety, we only carry one gun and it’s never loaded till we get to the tree,” Tom Waite said.  The gun popped and the first raccoon of the night tumbled to the ground.  Before long, the dogs were off on their next chase, which took us in another direction and ended the same way in another patch of woods.

Our third raccoon came as a surprise demonstration of the amazing power of a good hound’s nose.  We had leashed the dogs and were heading back to the trucks, about ready to call it a night.  All of a sudden, Dozer’s head jerked up and his nostrils flared as he caught some scent riding the wind and broke into a frantic tree chop.  We searched with our lights and sure enough, there in the twisted branches of a tall oak tree in the distance, we spotted our last raccoon of the night.

“Good boy, Dozer,” I heard somebody say.

Written by Bob Riepenhoff

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

February 3, 2002

Rochester - The orange glow of sunrise had barely reached the horizon when a distant flock of geese caught sight of our decoys and banked overhead for a closer look.  We laid still among the decoys, staring intently through camouflage netting as ten birds circled, then cupped their wings to land.  Just then, I heard my friend Tom Waite say, “Take’em.”  So we did.  At the sound of the guns, three geese folded, seven more flapped to safety and Onyx, Waite’s nine-month old black Labrador retriever, got a chance to find out what goose retrieving is all about.  That scene happened last week in a western Racine County field of corn stubble during the final days of the early September Canada goose season.

According to Jon Bergquist, migratory game bird ecologist with the Department of Natural Resources in Madison, the early goose hunt has become increasingly popular among hunters in recent years.  “It provides great hunting opportunities at a time when there is no other waterfowl hunting.” Bergquist told me.  The hunt was established back in 1990.  “We probably had about 6,000 to 8,000 hunters participating in the early years,” Bergquist said. This year, he said, more than 74,000 hunters applied for early goose hunt permits up from 69,716 last year.

The hunt aims to slow the rapidly growing population of local breeding giant Canada geese, a subspecies distinct from the geese that breed in Canada’s Hudson Bay area and migrate through Wisconsin each fall.  The giant geese are similar in appearance to the migratory Canada geese, but adults weigh about 12 to 15 pounds, compared to 6 to 10 pounds for their migrating cousins.  This year’s early goose hunt ran from Sept. 4 through 15.

“The season is set to focus the harvest on our local birds,” a population that generally has been increasing by 10% to 12% each year, Bergquist said.  The DNR did a five year evaluation to demonstrate to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that only local birds would be taken during early hunt. Although the federal framework permits hunting from Sept. 1 through 15, the DNR has opted to exclude the three-day Labor Day week-end.  “The reason hunters asked us to do that is that the Labor Day weekend is that last major recreational weekend of the summer,” Bergquist said, and people are busy with other activities.

At the outset, the early goose hunt was restricted to the southeast corner of the state, where flocks of local geese have grown to nuisance proportions, especially in parks and golf courses.  As the local goose population grew, Berguist said, “We’ve expanded the hunt three times since then so that, beginning last year, the hunt has been conducted statewide.”  Bergquist predicts that the goose hunt will remain on Wisconsin’s hunting calendar for a long time.  “Hunters like it, He said. This is building a tradition.”

Several days before our successful hunt, Tom Waite and I had kept vigil over some decoys, to no avail, on opening day of the early season.  All we saw that evening were lots of mourning doves coming to roost.  “The hardest part of this hunt is locating the geese,” said Waite, of Wind Lake. “Once these birds get shot at, they get wise and move on.”  So Waite scouted and located some geese working a private field where he had permission to hunt.

We got there the next morning at about 5:00a.m., set up five dozen decoys, hunkered down under camouflage nets and waited.  “In the early season, the geese are in family groups, not big flocks,” Waite said. “It’s best to break up your decoys in groups of four to ten birds, with space in between.”

From first light until about 10a.m., we had birds in the sky almost constantly.  We used a flag- a-goose colored cloth on the end of a long stick – to catch the eyes of distant flocks, and squawked on goose calls to sweet talk the closer ones.  We managed to pick up two more geese as the morning wore on. Both were “loners” that descended into the decoys with wings locked.  But most of the flocks we saw were wary “lookers” that would circle two or three times, see something they didn’t like and take off for parts unknown.  Even so, we saw a lot more geese than I’d expected and this hunt turned out to be a great way to get an early start on the 2001 waterfowl hunting season.

Written by Bob Riepenhoff

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

September 23, 2001

Stevens Point – A late-season grouse hunt isn’t always a walk in the park.  Chances are, you’ll end up having to deal with cold temperatures, deep snows, slippery ice and bitter winds.  With conditions like that, some might prefer to stay home.  To further complicate matters, in the late season, you’re hunting birds that are survivors. They are wary, gun-wise grouse that know how to hide high-up in the pine trees.  They know how to hold so tight that a dog might walk past them.  And they know how to run like a pheasant and flush out in front, way out of shotgun range.  We knew about all those problems before we set out, but we decided to go anyway.  Why?  Because a tough hunt is better than no hunt at all.

Our die-hard party for this late season grouse hunt was made up of four hunters and a whole bunch of dogs.  There was David Matthews of Menomonee Falls and his American water spaniel, Bailey; Frank Liska of Greenfield and his English pointer, Simon; Tom Waite of Greendale and his English setter, Mac, his English pointer, Jenna, and his water spaniel, Raison.  And there was me and my golden retriever, Buck.

Waite, a dog trainer, spends a lot of time hunting grouse in the late season.  “I’d say I spend as much time out there in the late season as I do in the regular season,” he told me. “The birds are spookier and a lot harder to get close to. It’s a real challenge.”  But there are some advantages.  “There’s less hunters,” Waite said.  “Most people won’t go out there and freeze.”  Not fearing that prospect, we loaded our trucks and headed up to some public hunting grounds, north of Stevens Point, one day last week.

The woods were blanketed with ankle to knee-deep snow that was covered with an icy crust.  The temperature was in the low 30’s and the winds were strong and harsh, gusting, I’d guess, up to about 30mph.  We pulled on felt-lined pack boots and a couple layers of warm clothes.  “Don’t dress too heavy,” Waite warned.  “If you break a sweat, you’ll get so cold and uncomfortable you’ll have to stop.”

We let the flushing dogs – Bailey, Buck and Raisin – hunt first.  In the late season, all the leaves are down and there is a lot more open space between clumps of cover, so visibility is good.  But the dry, powdery snow that day seemed to make poor scenting conditions for the dogs.  They worked close and we found plenty of fresh grouse tracks on top of the snow, but the dogs didn’t get very fired up.  In fact, the first two grouse of the morning flushed wild in front of Waite and me.  The dogs didn’t move them, they just flew, and they were well out of gun range.

The dogs and the hunters pressed on.  But ice and snow was gradually sticking to the pads of the dog’s feet.  After a couple hours, they were slowing down and looked like they were ready for a break.  So we returned to the trucks, kenneled the flushers and switched to the pointers.

Ordinarily, pointing dogs will run harder and cover a lot more ground than flushers, and that’s how the pointers started out.  But it didn’t take much crashing through that crusty snow for them to get cuts and scrapes on their legs and feet that slowed them down.  Instead of moving constantly through the cover, they would hold up every 50 yards or so, as if they couldn’t decide what to do next.  Waite’s setter, Mac, was the only dog to point birds.  He did it twice and each time, the bird ran out from under him and flushed wild.

It was frustrating. But, fortunately, one of those times, the bird flushed past Matthews, who shot our only grouse of the day.  “It was a very difficult hunt,” Waite, said afterward. “But that’s late season grouse hunting.  You might walk all day and see three or four birds.  And, if you shoot a bird or two, it’s like getting a limit earlier in the year.”

And it’s lot better than not hunting at all.

Written by Bob Riepenhoff

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

January 16, 2000

Lehr, N.D. -  In the first light of dawn, we could just make out the motion of distant wings above tree-tops on the gray horizon.  “Divers,” Tom Waite whispered to Tim Mader and me.  “Big flock coming in.”  We hunkered down in clumps of tall grass with the wind at our backs and watched.

The ducks stretched out in a long line, then bunched back together as birds jockeyed for position.  When the flock drew near, the ducks cupped their wings to come down for a closer look at our decoys.  That’s when I caught my first glimpse of the black-and white markings of a drake bluebill.

The flock swooped low and to the left, then hooked around behind us and circled back overhead, even lower, and we heard the stirring sound of wings cutting through the late October wind.

Big haul

When the birds descended, their feet outstretched for the water, Waite said, “Let’s take ‘em.”  Guns sounded, ducks folded and dogs hit the water.

So began what turned out to be the best diver duck hunt of my life.  We shot mixed-bag limits of bluebills, ring-necks and redheads.  It also served as a perfect introduction to the waterfowl hunting paradise of North Dakota.

According to Stan Kohn, waterfowl biologist with the North Dakota Game and Fish Department in Bismarck, record numbers of ducks in this prairie pothole country have attracted many hunters from Wisconsin in recent years.   “Wisconsin and Minnesota probably contribute the largest group of non-resident hunters who come here,” Kohn said.  Last year, 25,000 non-resident waterfowlers visited North Dakota.  The duck numbers illustrate why.

Population explosion

Between 1992 and 2000, North Dakota’s mallard harvest jumped from and estimated 39,200 to 222,400 ducks.  During that time, the gadwall take went from 6,500 to 132,900 ducks.  In addition, Kohn said, “The last three years we set records for the number of ducks produced.”

The reason so many ducks are using this region is simple:  water.  Following drought years in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, huge amounts of rain began to fall on North Dakota, expanding existing lakes and marshes and creating new potholes.  “We were certainly at record high water conditions last year,” Kohn said.  “Essentially, all of our wetlands are full.”

In 1992, he said, the state had 4.1 wetlands per square mile compared with 12 today.  The estimated duck production increased from about one brood per square mile to 623 broods during that time.  The abundant wetlands combine with about 3 million North Dakota acres enrolled in the federal Conservation Reserve program to make some of the best waterfowl habitat in North America.  The program pays farmers to keep grasslands, which creates nesting habitat not only for ducks, but also for pheasants and other wildlife.

Our group of Wisconsin hunters made the 12 hour drive west, hoping to take advantage of all those trends.  We were not disappointed.  The group included Waite, of Wind Lake; Mader of Mayville; Dave Matthews of Menomonee Falls, Frank Liska, of Greenfield and me.  Cody Zilhauer, of Wishek, ND also hooked up with us for some of the hunts.

Waite and Mader are both professional dog trainers.  Waite operates Dale Creek Gun Dogs in Salem and Mader runs Blue Grass Kennels in Mayville so there was no shortage of dogs.  We had pointers, flushers and retrievers- a mix of both young and seasoned dogs.  Of course, I also brought along my two goldens, Buck and Buddy, for water and upland work and for good company.

Our game plan was to split up into two groups each morning and set up decoys on open water for ducks.  Then we’d reassemble in the afternoon to walk the fields for pheasants, sharp tailed grouse and Hungarian partridge till dark.

Pheasant numbers up

Pheasant and sharptail numbers are good this year, Kohn said.  “Pheasant numbers are quite high right now south of I-94,” he said.  “For sharptails, traditionally, the southwest corner of the state has been best. But this year, the southeast and south central have been better.”  Hungarian partridge numbers are down.  “The Huns took a beating during the drought in the 1980’s and still haven’t recovered,” Kohn said.

We covered a lot of southeastern North Dakota, both in the trucks and on foot, and we found at least some birds- ducks, pheasants, sharptails or Huns- just about everywhere we looked.

A non-resident small game and waterfowl license costs $93.

Written by Bob Riepenhoff
Milwaukee Journal- Sentinel
November 4, 2001

We were hunting a series of hedgerows and thickets on public land at the Bong Recreation Center near Kansasville in Kenosha County.  In theory, when a cottontail rabbit is chased, it will make a big circle in an attempt to elude the hounds.  If a hunter stays put, he has a pretty good chance of intercepting the rabbit when it returns to its home territory.  So Nowak and I spread out and took our stands, while Waite stayed with the dogs.

As I stood at the edge of the willows, I watched and waited and listened to the sound of the dogs.  For several minutes I stared at the motionless landscape.  All the while, the barking dogs grew more and more faint as the rabbit’s trail took them further into the distance.  Then the whole thing turned around.

Now, I could hear the howling sounds of the dogs getting louder as they followed the rabbit back in my direction.  Their barking became more excited and intense as they slowly closed the gap.  Then, at the edge of my peripheral vision, I caught a sudden glimpse of movement, then turned to see the rabbit running through the brush.  I raised my gun and fired.

“Did you get him?”  I heard Waite shout in the distance.” I think so,” I yelled.  But when I got to the spot, the rabbit wasn’t there.  I looked around and found some tracks that lead into another thicket.  But inside, there was a maze of crisscrossing rabbit tracks that led in every direction.

A few minutes later the beagles arrived, followed by Waite.  We watched Thunder and Sister as they continued to methodically track.  One by one, they stuck their noses into each and every rabbit track for a good sniff.  Then they reared back their heads and howled before moving on to the next track.  It didn’t take them long to find the rabbit, which had made its way deep into some heavy brush before giving up the ghost.

“That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Waite said of this run. “ The dogs find the rabbit, circle him and bring him to you.”  He was right.  This was pretty much a classic, textbook beagle chase.  It doesn’t always work that way.  In fact, we had witnessed several examples of how it’s not supposed to work earlier that morning.

The first four rabbits we jumped all got away.  From studying the tracks in the snow, we learned that two of the rabbits found holes and ducked inside, leaving the frustrated beagles barking and howling at the entrances.  And two others had spirited across ice-covered flats that didn’t leave enough scent for the beagles to follow.  The dogs became confused and started back-tracking.  But we kept at it.  After we broke the ice with that first rabbit, our luck changed and we ended up getting two more before deciding to call it a day.

Afterward, Waite said it was a shame that more people, especially kids, didn’t take up rabbit hunting.  “It’s an easy hunt,” he said.  “You don’t have to be quiet or sit real still.  There’s lots of rabbits and plenty of public land available for hunting.”  And, of course, the cottontail rabbit season continues through February, long after most of the other hunting seasons have shut down.

Written by Bob Riepenhoff

Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel

January 7, 1996

I stood at the edge of a thicket, listening to the hounds and straining my eyes to catch a quick glimpse of white moving through the trees. Snowshoe hares!  It had been a long time since I last hunted the big white rabbits of the woods.  So, when Tom Waite of Greendale suggested that we give it a try before all the snow melted, I was ready to go.  We loaded Stubby and Sister, two of Waite’s tried and true rabbit-tracking beagles, into my truck and headed north.

Weighing in at about 3 to 4 pounds, snowshoe hares are bigger than cottontail rabbits and, as the name implies, they have huge hind feet capable of distributing their weight, even on top of deep, soft snow.  A hare is also distinguished by its color, which changes with the seasons to provide natural camouflage.  In winter, hares sport a pure white coat, which turns to brown in the summer months.  Although snowshoe hare hunting is open year-round, Waite likes to hunt them from January through March.  “It’s a time when most of the other hunting is done,” he said.  “Before the walleye runs get going on the rivers and the spring turkey hunting starts up, it’s a good excuse to get out and hunt.”

Hare hunting with beagles is similar to cottontail rabbit hunting.  The dogs jump a rabbit and track it as it circles through the cover out in front of the dogs and back to the area where it was jumped.  But hare hunting takes place on a bigger scale.  “A cottontail will make a circle of about 100 yards or so before it starts doubling back,” Waite said.” And they sometimes pull tricks like doubling back on their tracks or ducking into a hole.”  Snowshoes, which are tireless runners, rely more on speed and distance than trickery.  “They make big circles up to a mile or more,” Waite said.  “Once they’re jumped, their means of safety is to simply outrun you.”

With all that in mind, I pulled the truck off a dirt road and parked it on some public land that skirts the Eau Pleine River in Marathon County. It was one of those rare, in-between mornings when you could almost feel spring taking over and winter letting go of its grip.  There was still some snow on the ground, but the sun was shining and the snow was melting, exposing patches of brown earth.  We loaded our shotguns, turned the dogs loose and began hiking a logging trail that took us into a stand of young growth aspen trees with trunks about as thick around as your thumb.

The thicket was crisscrossed with a network of trails made by hares, but they weren’t the only residents.  A grouse flushed from a thorny, trailside blow-down, affording what would have been an easy shot, had the season been open.  Later, we put up a few woodcocks as well, and it was fun to watch them fly.

It didn’t take too long before the beagles started to howl, signaling that they had jumped a snowshoe hare and the chase was on. It was the first of many chases that day.  Each time they started, our strategy was simple:  we spread out, looked for a stump or a clump or a piece of high ground that afforded a reasonably good view, took our stands and waited.

The dogs ran well, relentlessly pursuing the fast-running hares, following their big circles through the cover, even if they were 5 to 10 minutes behind their quarry.  We listened as the dogs took the chase so deep into the thicket that we could barely hear their plaintive voices.  Then we got ready as the howls began to grow gradually louder and the chase turned back in our direction.

Sometimes the speedy hares escaped.  I saw two of them scamper across openings in the distance, well out of gun range.  But three times that day, the long chases ended with the sound of a gun.  The hares we shot all had mottled brown and white coats in transition between their winter and summer colors.

“We timed this right,” Waite said afterward.”  In a couple more weeks, they’ll be all brown and a lot harder to see.”  And by then, of course we’ll be busy fishing for walleyes or scouting for turkey.

Written by Bob Riepenhoff
The Milwaukee Journal- Sentinel
March 28, 1999

Force Fetching, Part 2: Force fetching is the only road to a guaranteed retrieve. It doesn’t matter what the breed may be, the force fetch is truly the only way to teach a dog what is expected during the retrieving process. In this 15 Minute Trainer Video entitled Force Fetching, Tom Waite, Professional Gundog Trainer walks you through the process of teaching you how to read your dog, how and where to administer pressure, what different reactions mean and how to work through the problems that may occur during this process. In this video, you have the opportunity to see several different dogs with different issues to help you better understand how to cope with and compare to your own personal dog. Force fetching is one of the most troublesome processes for most dog owners. A dog can learn in short order how to escape pressure and beat you at you own game. In this 15 Minute Trainer Video, Tom Waite talks you through these melt downs and shows examples of how to correct them. The force fetch done correctly can be the most gratifying process or the biggest train wreck if not approached correctly.

Force fetching is the only road to a guaranteed retrieve. It doesn’t matter what the breed may be, the force fetch is truly the only way to teach a dog what is expected during the retrieving process. In this 15 Minute Trainer Video entitled Force Fetching, Tom Waite, Professional Gundog Trainer walks you through the process of teaching you how to read your dog, how and where to administer pressure, what different reactions mean and how to work through the problems that may occur during this process. In this video, you have the opportunity to see several different dogs with different issues to help you better understand how to cope with and compare to your own personal dog. Force fetching is one of the most troublesome processes for most dog owners. A dog can learn in short order how to escape pressure and beat you at you own game. In this 15 Minute Trainer Video, Tom Waite talks you through these melt downs and shows examples of how to correct them. The force fetch done correctly can be the most gratifying process or the biggest train wreck if not approached correctly.

This 15 Minute Trainer Video entitled Force Fetching (Transition With Collar) was produced to teach you how to make the transition from the table and the ear pinch to the ground and the collar. In this video Tom Waite, Professional Gundog Trainer shows and teaches you how to work through the problems that may occur during this process. Following the process through the video ensures control during retrieving drills or the real deal. The 15 Minute Trainer Video process teaches the dog to understand that the force fetch is not only a hands on approach, but something that can be corrected at a distance. Once this process is completed, your dog’s desire to retrieve and please you grows dramatically, making a close knit dog and handler team.