The Y Drill

Freighter has spent a good part of this week working on his “sit” and doing casting drills. The tests last weekend showed some holes in his training, so hubby is going back and working on those things.

Sit exercises and casting drills don’t make for a very exciting post so I thought I would share a little about the day we spent training with Bill Hillmann. The seminar finished on Sunday, but we stayed to join the small group that was training with Bill on Monday. I think there were 7 of us.

We were supposed to train in the morning, but a storm blew through so we did not get started until after noon.

Bill set up a Y-Drill.

In this drill, orange bumpers are thrown in the shape of a Y. The purpose of this drill is to work on the dog’s marking. You want the dog to go out to where the bumper fell and hunt that area. This drill works on that.

Here is a more complete explanation:

If you are interested in running this drill, you should watch the entire set of five YouTubes on this drill.

Our Y Drill was set up a little different from my diagram. The first bumper was thrown into a pond and we ran it in conjunction with a blind. We also had throwers and did not use the home plate as shown in the video.

Freighter did a good job on this. We had been working on a lot of different throws with him and in conjunction with blinds. It was a great work out because the blind was 200+ yards and he also did the three marks which included a swim.

Bill tried to get Freighter to break by calling out some numbers, but stinker was perfectly steady.

Bill suggested trying to send Freighter without the handler using his hand and just his voice. That may be something we try. We have noticed that he anticipates his handler’s movement.

I really liked training in this small group setting because every dog had something to work on and suggestions given to those handlers were also something to consider while we are training.

We are joining the Fit Dog Friday blog hop hosted by Slimdoggy, Peggy’s Pet Place, To Dog with Love.

Have a nice weekend! We plan to get some training and some household chores done this weekend. Both are badly needed. 🙂

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…

17 thoughts on “The Y Drill”

Haven’t worked on this drill yet but will be in the future. You explained it so well and your diagram was great. Thank you for sharing what we learned.

The smaller groups do give you the opportunity to customize your training which has to be a good thing. LOL household chores, we so know that one. Have a fabulous Friday.
Best wishes Molly

Great pictures, as always! I love reading your posts/looking at the pix. I don’t usually have time to comment though.

I did my household chores yesterday — while Ducky was at daycare and hubby was at work — so now I have the weekend to work/play with all 3 of my furry “kids” and watch a movie or two with the hubby.

I love the look of joy on the face during training.

Love, He’s Off!! Also, there is great truth ~ in-sync with body cues, this Chessie characteristic has made each of ours such great therapy dogs. The youngest, Miss Erynn, is being trained as a personal service dog for John, She is aware, bright, and already understanding her new role, Amazing.
Remember the Greatest Generation this weekend.

Aren’t they always perfect for someone else? I like the small group settings too, and find it’s far better for the handler than the larger group training.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend.

It’s great to watch Freighter and we can learn a lot what we can try with Easy. It’s not easy to handle Easy, but we do our best. Thanks :o)

I love Freighter’s enthusiasm!

Great work Freighter. I love his enthusiasm off the line – you can just see it in the photos, how he bounds out there. You’re right about group training like that – you can learn so much from other’s corrections! Thanks for joining the Hop.