Tolling training

I have absolutely zero christmas feeling so far. Well, maybe next weekend if we go to the Christmas market in Uppsala castle as we planned it will appear from somewhere. I'm also really annoyed that our course is not finishing before Christmas, but instead we will have the exam after the holidays. I'd rather have it over and done with before.

The weather is not helping the Christmas spirit either. Today we spent the day at a toller-meeting training and it was fun but when I look at the pics from there it just looks gloomy and horrible. And quite interesting if you have no idea what's going on :-D

Let me introduce to you the art of training "tolling":


Even if we have a toller I have never trained the actual tolling part before. Basically, tollers' orange colour attracts ducks. Tollers were bred to resemble a fox since foxes hunt ducks by waving their tail, again since ducks for some reason nobody really knows are attracted and curious by this colour and come closer to see what's up. So by breeding a dog that resembles the fox, hunters could play with the dog close to the shore to get the ducks to come closer and when they were close enough they could shoot them and then the dog would do the retrieving of the bird as well.

So what we did was having a toller net up which should resemble a bush where you hide yourself and the dog behind. The grass on the other side should in a real situation be water. Then you'd make the dog quickly and repeatedly fetch a ball or a toy on the sides of the bush to make the dog visible and non-visible for the ducks which makes them curious to come closer, during that time the dog should obviously stay quiet and focused on you and not the ducks. When the ducks are close enough you'd make the dog sit or lay down and eventually give him the command of fetching once the bird(s) is down. During the training a person just threw a dummy (people that don't have dogs; a dummy is this thing we train with instead of a bird) that the dog fetched instead.

It was a very funny training and it was cool to see how Faro reacted when I started whispering and pretended to sneak up to the bush quietly not to scare the imaginary birds. He was all in with me on the sneaking up part, I almost expected him to start crawling. Later when we trained retrieving with some real birds he was less cooperative but all in all he was a good boy today.