I thought I'd give an update on my Brittany pup. She is now very happy to play with other pups near to her own age and she is kenneled with 2 lab pups a week or two younger than her but a bit bigger with no problems.
I took her out of the courtyard and kennel area for the first time yesterday to begin assessing her before doing any real training. I always like to form some idea of a pups probable levels of body and mental sensitivity before training commences.
This little devil is as bold as brass and very little worries her. She saw her very first "water" in the form of a puddle on short grass and went straight to retrieve the length of soft plastic pipe I tossed in for her.
I tried her with a fresh shot partridge as a retrieve and she really loved that !
She saw hens in a pen for the first time and charged the pen. One of the hens ran towards her and flapped it's wings at her. She jumped back a couple of feet but at once recovered her courage and her curiousity and went back to the pens wires to stick her nose through.
She wind scented the pigeon loft and headed straight for it but, to begin with, she failed to see the pigeons a few feet above her head. When she finally did see them, she sat underneath them maybe hoping one of them would fall into her jaws !
I took her to a bit of cover where a few rabbits live and she was fascinated, perhaps by the rabbit scent but perhaps by the scent of a pheasant that hangs about there. Wanting to know if she would still retrieve with game scent up her nose from all around her ,I threw a partridge about 25 feet into some cover bordering a narrow little pond. She was very quickly out there and bringing it back . As yet she is not retrieving to hand but I have all summer to work on that. She seems to have what I want already bred into her. The only thing she will not do that every other young pup I've trained so far would do, is that she has little interest in a "wing on a string." It just fails to fascinate her. I doubt very much that she will lack in pointing instinct however ,having seen her interest in the hens and pigeons.
In short I like what I see in this pup, she is now about 14 weeks old.
The partridge found and retrieved from light cover.
Bill T.