New pup training

[btupy]

I put a deposit down today for my first dog, and she will be ready to be picked up middle of May. I am getting a yellow lab female from Schelhaas Family Pups in Pipestone, MN. I live in town but I have a large double lot so I am going to be putting in an electric fence this spring. The dog will have a kennel off the garage and be in the garage/kennel when she pleases. I will be training her the basic obedience first of all, but then I will be training her for pheasant hunting. I'm not into any duck or goose hunting really so I'm not too worried about those.

I am looking for any advice on which training series DVD set I should go with. I would like to find a series that starts with basic obedience and then goes into upland game training. I would also like to stick with one series start to finish because I think it will make it easier on me and the dog. Also E-collar training included in there would be huge. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Todd Caswell]

Congrats on your new puppy. It sounds like you have a good plan in place. To me it doesn't matter if your training a gun dog for upland, a waterfowl dog, a Hunt Test dog, or a Field trial dog you still need to go through the same Basics program to end up with a finished dog.  Since you mentioned that your dog will be a collar dog i recommend a program that does collar conditioning and force fetch, we refer to these as "pressure based" programs and the top three are all based off of the same principals. First off i would get the DVD "training a retriever Puppy" by Bill Hillman Iv'e raised my last 4 with this and it is a great puppy course that really sets them up to succeed when formal OB and training begins..  Then I transition them to the Fowldawgs series by Rick Stawski, very affordable and easy to follow. It has it all from start to finish to produce a top notch gun dog, where are you located??

You also have a couple retriever clubs that are pretty close to you, I recomend checking them out, lots of good advise and good grounds to use for training ..

[btupy]

I am located just south of the twin cities. 

Does the Fowldogs series have formal obedience training? Or what do you use between "retriever puppy training" and Fowldogs?  

[Todd Caswell]

Yes it does'