Welcome to Smart Gun Dogs
Featured Courses
Smart Gun Dogs has been set up to make gun dog training available to pet owners as well as people wanting to work with their animals. Thousands of us choose gun dog breeds as our household pet, it's a choice we made many years back.
We teach gun dog specific skills to give you valuable tools for real life situations as well as provide information to you on how these fantastic breeds tick. Many of these skills can transfer to living with a gun dog as a pet and certain breeds benefit from this sort of training over group class situations and appreciate it as breed specific enrichment, they have a desire to use the behaviours they have been born with and we can show you how to get the best from that.
If your gun dog breed is chasing and going "deaf" in certain situations, putting itself in danger or has you struggling to understand why he does what he does then this is the place for you.
Force Free – Everything about Dog Smart is force free. The best training comes from strong bonds, we will help you make your bond like super glue. Dog Smart is committed to ethical training
Fun – These are serious skills and serious situations but they can still be fun, training should be enjoyable for both you and your dog.
We train using games that build confidence for you both but also ensures invaluable life skills are learned and can be taken and used in multiple environments and scenarios. We take time to find out what your dog finds rewarding and only use force free methods using the positive reinforcement we know your dog truly loves.
Achievable – We understand that the skills that gun dog breeds posses can be overwhelming and difficult to manage and sometimes seem like an unachievable task, especially at certain key life stages in a gun dogs maturity. We meet you all as individuals and train the dogs you have in front of you, let us help you turn the unachievable into the achievable by evaluating and selecting tasks to practice specific to your needs. As trainers we have leaned to manage our expectations and work with the individual.
Its all part of being Dog Smart
Knowledge – Oliver started working with gundogs in his very first Job at force green kennels many years ago, he has spent many years shooting over dogs, he joined the beating teams at the age of 14, nowadays he works both his springer spaniels and his wirehaired vizsla on one of the local shoots at times working all three together in the beating line and assisting with picking up.
Having a lifetime of experiences with dogs we believe every dog we live with, train or meet will teach us something new.
We have individually achieved industry recognised qualifications in dog training and to ensure we are up to date with modern, force free training techniques we regularly update our knowledge through courses, webinars, books and training days. Not to mention the continued lessons we get every day from our own canine family.
Using these values at the core of everything we do, ensures you and your dog get modern, force free training that you will both enjoy and is relevant to you and your family.
Skills Covered - The gun dog classes are no more than four dogs at a time and we will work with individuals. The beginners gundog and the 121 packages now come with an online course to support you with training skills at home.
With these breeds we think it's important to manage expectations and teach at a level the dog can achieve to make progress. Some of the skills we cover in gun dog training include -
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Heelwork - Important for any dog but also part of the gun dog club graded criteria
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The Off Switch - Teaching your dogs to be able to switch off and wait a hugely valuable skill.
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Off Leash Connection - One of the first tasks for any dog, off leash reliability, not as easy as it sounds for a hunting breed
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Working Around Others - This is hard for some of the younger dogs, our aim is to make this normal and something your dogs can happily deal with.
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Boundary and Gate Control - Part of off leash connection, you cant control your dog if its headed of without you, so teach it to wait for you instead
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Environmental Awareness - This is a human skill, we teach you to help recognise that something is about to happen and how to manage the outcome, this is about reading your dogs body language in context to the environment.
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How to Play! - Sound silly this one, but... play in force free training is key to success, but your dogs will find certain aspects more rewarding that others, we teach you how to use play to get behaviour and when to use what as a reinforcer.
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Stop! Recall, direct, hunt - Key gun dog skills to control your dogs movement at a distance.
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Retrieve! - Of course, nearly forgot!
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Cue proofing, Fluency, Chain Testing, Problem Solving, Distance, Duration, Distraction and More
Equipment & Venues- Dog Smart has invested in most of the equipment you will need for gundog work, we hold canvas dummies of various types and sizes including puppy dummies, as well as dokens, when suited and when available we also use cold game sourced from our local shoot.
We have place boards and marker posts.
For the more advanced dogs we have two "Air & Go" dummy launchers that are particularly useful for the first introductions to shot, we also have 4 remote blank fired dummy launchers and a drag lure machine and two "dummy droppers" as well as blank firing pistols and these all help with setting up realistic scenarios when training.
You can order selected equipment from us within our group class and package options as an add on.
To get started the most you will need is a whistle, we have listed recommendations below, we do not require the use of slip leads in training.
Whistle recommendations:
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ACME 210.5 - Short range most suited to spaniels
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ACME 211.5 - Longer range most suited to retrievers
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ACME 212 - Most suited to the HPR breeds
Currently we train in three venues, basic skills and 121 training is mostly taught at the secure venue at little warden in Brasted.
More advanced dogs have access to a venue at Bitchet Green nr Sevenoaks, this is a much larger venue with woodland and large fields and also quite a few pheasnats!
Water days are held at a private venue in Southbourgh which has a fantastic lake and some surrounding cover.
We are always looking for new training venues for the gundogs to train on and pay hire costs on an hourly rate, if you have or know of anyone that has land they can offer to us please do contact us at trianers@dogsmarttrainingbehaviour.co.uk
