Retriever Training: A Back-to-Basics Approach »

Robert Milner has been training dogs professionally for over twenty-five years. Over that stretch he has trained about 1,500 retrievers for hunting and field trials, drug and explosive detection, and even search-and-rescue operations. He has judged retriever trials in the both the U.S. and in England. Milner retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force Reserve in 1995, and has been a full-time commercial real estate broker since 1987. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with his wife and yellow Lab.

If it seems like today's retrievers are becoming increasingly hyperactive and hard to train, well, they are, says Robert Milner in this new book on retriever training. And the fault is not only in the breeding but in the training, both of which render a dog better suited for field-trialing than hunting. To reverse this trend of difficult dogs and difficult training methods, Milner offers a system every bird hunter can easily understand and follow. This back-to-basics approach teaches how to pick a pup that will likely be calm and obedient, and then how to train that pup on the basics of steadiness and obedience to create the perfect hunting and at-home companion. In Retriever Training, Milner has taken the latest scientific research into how dogs learn and combined it with his own commonsense training methods. The result is an approach that is as effective as it is easy. For the hunter who wants a calm, steady, and obedient retriever, there's no better training method.