Over the off season I wanna work with my 3 year old lab on whistle training. She has a pretty solid foundation of the basic obedience and retrieving skills. How do you get started and is there any good DVDs or books that are geared towards this.

Do the commands and whistle right after the command. Repeat this a lot. Then the dog will associate the command with the whistle. It's easy. I do spaniels, so it's once for hup, twice for turn in upland, and lots of peeps for come. Good luck.

Best to start it back in a obedience drill and on a leash. Above is correct with initiating with the verbal command (that part doesn't take long at all). Once your dog has a good understanding of the whistle commands, if she is collar conditioned with an e-collar you can condition the whistle commands at distances. In retrievers we usually use 1 toot for "sit" and 2-3 quick toots for "here"

JC

My poor dog training vocab has skewed my post I believe. I am talking about whistling while on retrieves to direct the dog to the down bird. Like tweet, dog sits and looks, hand motion in direction toward the bird, tweet, dog goes.

Ideally what's usually done all verbal directional commands, we toot to get dog to sit and look, and we have a come in whistle

That's casting during a blind retrieve You're blowing the whistle to stop the dog and sit facing you. Hand signals are then used to direct the dog, other than a come in whistle. There is quite a bit that goes into getting a dog to that point. It is more than just teaching them to associate commands(sit & here) with a whistle. It is going to be pretty difficult to just piece things together and get her there reliably. You need to look into a sequential training program. Smartworks, Total Retriever Training, and Fowl Dogs are some of the more popular. Take a look at the flowcharts on Graham's and/or Lardy's websites to get an idea of what is involved.

Dang those Labs are complicated… hand signals, sequential training, flowcharts…

I just set my pointing dog on the ground and turn him loose, he goes and finds birds and points at ‘em, I shoot ‘em, repeat... Simple!

The smart works collection is great for diagrams and seeing the setup of drills, it's also good if have a someone you can watch run the drills from,
Find a local pro in your area

Friends of mine who train pointers, setters and spaniels all think us retriever folks are crazy... Between the training programs and equipment,,, they just shake their heads dumbfounded.

Angie

nice