The day I saw the light at the end of the 'vooruit'

I know what you are thinking (unless you are Dutch)...what does 'vooruit' mean?! Vooruit is the Send away (on a straight line) command, also known as Voraus or Envoi en avant. This command is part of the retrieving training as well, and for me it's the most difficult command ever. 

The retrieving Send away (from now on I'll simply refer to it as Vooruit) is part, but not limited/exclusive to, of the so called Blind retrieve, where the dog is sent to retrieve a bird/dummy that he didn't see fall. In this case, the dog is expected to follow hand, voice and whistle signals to be directed to the bird/dummy. Scent and wind´s direction are also in place here, but I won't go into this right now. As first step of a Blind retrieve, the Vooruit normally starts with the dog on a heel position and ends when the next command is given, which can vary as much as a stop, sit/lay down, left/right or search (in case the bird/dummy is hidden by grass or bushes). 

At first hand, the command doesn't seem too complicated: the dog must proceed on a straight line. Ehi, if I can teach my dog to roll over while holding a blanket in his mouth or to walk on three legs, I can certainly do this! Besides, I had a Send away command already for agility. 

I have soon learned that the Vooruit is nothing like the agility Send away, where the dog is indeed sent ahead of the handler, but mostly only few steps away and shortly followed by the handler him/her self. Moreover, in agility there's always a set of obstacles where the dog is sent to, therefore a clear path for him to follow. When retrieving, first of all the bird/dummy is normally very far away from the handler, who doesn't follow the dog. Also, the bird/dummy never falls in the same place twice, therefore there are no markers! Like if this is not enough, retrieving fields are seldom flat and freshly trimmed, but rather bumped and highly irregular, with rocks, canals, trees and bushes. The Vooruit is also not quite like the Send away in IPO/Mondioring, where the dog is mostly sent all the way to a fence at the end of the filed, or some other sort of marker. In obedience the dog is sent to a cone or to the box, therefore another nice marker where you can place your target, in case you use one. I'm not sure about sheepdog, perhaps you have somenthing similar there.

In few words, the Vooruit is a command to tell your dog "I'm sending you to the dummy, trust me, it's somewhere out there, my next command could be a sit and then a go left, or perhaps you will even find the dummy on this line already, but until then just go on a straight line please"! Yah...walking on a straight line...so simple and yet, so difficult to teach: no wonders I'm struggling with it since day 1 of our retrieving training. But today it happened! I saw that look on Indi's face...well, I could not really see his face, but it was like I could read his thoughts: "follow the line, there will be somenthing out there...."!!! I must say that our Vooruit is effective few meters away only, but I think it will go faster from now on.

This was one of the crucial mistakes: at the beginning I did too many marked retrieves, where the dog does see the dummy falling,  and I started on the blind ones only later on. In this way, it´s more likely that the dog gets used to the idea that "no fall, no dummy", and therefore it becomes more difficult to teach the  blind retrieves. Also, one thing that is not making my life easy with the Vooruit is speed. While speed in dog sports is overall a good thing, when retrieving it can sometimes preveal over tracking (if the dog goes too fast, a scent/dummy might be missed) or precision. This is one of the reasons I had to proceed with baby steps, rewarding before Indi could run full speed in any other direction than in front, and normally this happens quite fast.


Vooooooooruit!


At the moment, I mostly train the Vooruit with the ball. I drop/hide the ball on the ground, which is a challenge already as Indi seems to have a radar for when I'm about to do that, and I send him to it with the Vooruit command. I started with a very short distance, so that Indi 1) could see that somenthing was there, and 2) was basically bumping into the ball while proceeding on a straight line without zigzaging. From there, I slowly increased the distance and tried to remove the visual on the ball as soon as I could. Indi is a poodle, and if I teach him that Vooruit means go the ball, he will learn it in no time, but also he won't do it if the ball isn't there, no matter how small I make the ball or how well I fade it away. I don't know about you, but I kind of like this!