A pigeon lifts off the grass and your 12 month old spaniel is gone. They come back 3 minutes later, filthy, delighted, and completely uninterested in the treat in your hand.
This is not a training failure and it is not naughtiness. It is the most strongly built-in thing your dog does, arriving at the age when your cues carry least.
Why birds, and why now
Flushing breeds were bred to find birds, push them into the air and work at a distance from the handler. A pigeon taking off is the exact picture the job is built around.
Adolescence supercharges it. Your dog can now cover real ground. Around the onset of the stage, dogs also respond less to the cues of the person who raised them. That responsiveness returns later.
Every chase also pays, whether or not a bird is caught. The run itself is the reward, which makes this one of the best-paid behaviours your dog has ever performed.
So each successful chase makes the next one easier and faster. That is the part to interrupt, and it is interrupted by management before it is interrupted by training.
Manage the ground and the hour
Keep a 20 to 30 foot long line on a harness in open country for now. It is how you stop your dog rehearsing the chase, which is the whole problem.
Avoid the places and hours that are full of birds. The lake at dusk, the stubble field, the estuary at low tide.
Walk the boring routes on purpose while you build the skills. A hedge-lined lane is a better classroom than a field of gulls.
Scan ahead rather than down at your phone. You want to see the birds 20 seconds before your dog does.
Behaviour change is built from management plus reinforcement together, and this month the management half is doing most of the work.
Never let your dog chase birds near a road, a cliff, livestock, or water you would not swim in yourself.
Give the chase somewhere legal to go
Suppressing the sequence does not remove it. A flushing dog with nowhere to put finding, flushing and retrieving will pick the target you did not choose.
Play retrieve with rules, twice a day, for 3 minutes. You throw, your dog fetches, you take it, and you decide when the next throw happens.
Use a thrown ball or a dummy as the reward for coming back, not food alone. For a spaniel, being sent again is often worth more than cheese.
Add hunt-and-find work: hide the toy in long grass and send your dog to search. That uses the nose and finishes calmer than a sprint.
Teach a stop, in whatever form you can get it. Ask for it at a distance with a toy in play, and pay standing still generously.
Look at a gundog-style class that works with reward-based methods, or a scent-work or mantrailing class. A spaniel with a job is easier to walk than a spaniel with a hobby.
Reward-based training is associated with higher reported responsiveness and fewer reported problem behaviours, and a spaniel will work hard for the right pay.
Practise where the birds are boring
Stand 100 feet from a few birds on the ground, on the long line. Feed 1 treat at your leg each time your dog looks and turns back.
If your dog cannot take food, you are too close. Add distance rather than repeating the cue louder. Learning happens below the point where your dog cannot cope.
Practise recall at the moment before the interest, not during the chase. A dog already running is a dog you are not going to reach.
Keep sessions to 5 minutes, and end while your dog is still succeeding.
When off lead is not appropriate yet
Off lead in open country is not a stage every adolescent dog is ready for. If your dog has chased successfully in the last month, they are not ready this month.
No off lead where there are birds, until the recall works with birds visible and on a line.
No off lead near roads, railways, livestock, cliffs, or tidal water, at any point in adolescence.
Use fenced fields for free running instead, if you can find one. A long line and a fenced field cover most of what an off-lead walk is for.
Assume this is months of long line rather than weeks, and revisit it at 18 months old rather than next Saturday.
Safety note
Chasing livestock, deer or ground-nesting birds is a legal and welfare problem as well as a training one. A dog can be shot at, or killed on a road, doing it. Keep the long line on in those places. Never tie the line to your waist or wrap it round your hand. Reward-based methods are what the veterinary behaviour guidance recommends. Punishment-based approaches are associated with fear, avoidance and defensive aggression. An electronic collar is not an answer here. If your dog comes home lame, coughing, or off their food after a chase, or the behaviour has changed suddenly, book a veterinary examination. Sudden behaviour change warrants one, and pain frequently presents as a change in behaviour rather than as obvious lameness.
If this is one of several adolescent things going on at once, the Assessment will name the pattern underneath. It is free, takes about 3 minutes, and asks for no email address.
Today's version, in one line: long line on, walk the lane instead of the lake, and 3 minutes of retrieve you start and stop.