Last Monday, when we stopped to air the dogs in a rest area on the way back to Anchorage after a month in the "interior," we chatted with a guy, his wife and dog who stopped to do the same. He asked about the black dog I was walking on lead and commented he is a bit larger than the one he had but still within "Standard." He said his was a pointing Lab and told me where he got it when I asked. I told him about the two I'd had which did point naturally and how I'd developed them on wild quail in Arizona and admitted the current one did not. His dog was a 2 1/2 yo "PL" from a well known kennel and they were all headed down the highway to NV for a mule deer and blue grouse hunt and then on to AZ for snake breaking and quail hunting. He said the dog points tennis balls but hadn't transitioned to birds yet. He'd trained the dog to stand on the command "whoa" and then look at an object he pointed his finger at when he said "point." He said it would "point" a tennis ball for a long time like this so he knew it "had the [pointing] instinct." He demonstrated on a stick he'd thrown and it really did stand and look at the stick after carrying it a short way and being commanded "whoa" and "point." Then it looked at him and back at the stick and so forth just as many Labs will w/o any training at all! I thought I'd already heard all there was about training pointing dogs but this was a "new one" on me. He didn't volunteer how he would train the transition to birds let alone wild ones and I didn't ask!
This wasn't my first traveling encounter with a "PL" owner whose dog really didn't point naturally, but it was the first time anyone detailed his training. Most of the 15 or so others just naively expected the dogs to point without training as any self-respecting pointing dog will! And most PL trainers are pretty quiet about their training methods though occasionally one will mention some variation of the force training "whoa point" methods or evasively say something like "It's too dangerous to discuss on the internet!"
Jere