Sandra Groschwitz
Dowel Hold
Thick dowel hold with my GSD Hexe, 17 mts old. The “hold” is an important piece to any retrieve. Once the “hold” is great and proofed, you can continue to back chain the rest of the retrieve, ie pickup, running out, coming back fast etc. The taking and dropping of the dowel on command is very important. So is the calm grip without chewing while holding the object. Object Retrieval is a beast of a behavior chain to teach. There are many small pieces to it and some of it is easy to miss.