The stop whistle is an integral cue needed in gundog work but is often seen as a struggle to teach and even harder to maintain.
There is perhaps nothing more satisfying than watching a busy spaniel or HPR mid-hunt, or a labrador galloping out on a retrieve, immediately stop what they’re doing, remain still, and look back at their handler, eagerly awaiting their next instruction, all after hearing the simple “peep” of the stop whistle.
Whether you have a pet or working retriever, hunting retriever (aka spaniel breeds), or HPR, you will need to teach your gundog to stop on the whistle.
The primary reasons for this are being able to work as a team at a distance and for safety.
On a shoot day, we don’t always want to recall our dogs, but we do need a way of keeping them out of the way of firing Guns and hunting in the right areas to ensure that game birds aren’t unnecessarily disturbed, and that all shot quarry is retrieved.
Out of season, or for those who don’t work their gundogs, the stop whistle remains incredibly useful for safety. When you’re out walking your gundog off lead in the countryside, it’s another tool (along with your recall) that you can use to prevent them from galloping off on a scent or chasing wildlife.
In this month’s blog, we’ll explore the common scenarios in which you’ll need a stop whistle, the debate over sitting and standing, the biggest challenge handlers face when trying to teach it, and finally, how to progress to get a lasting and reliable stop.
When do gundogs need to stop on the whistle?
When dogs are working on a shoot or in a competition, there are three main scenarios for the stop whistle.
Retrieving and picking up:
After you’ve sent your dog on a retrieve, they might need help finding the dummy or bird. There are tons of reasons why they could have gone off the line or ended up out of the area of fall.
While we could recall them to try and send them back out on the line, there is still no guarantee they will find the dummy or bird. This approach of constantly calling the dog back would also be timely, inefficient and unnecessary hard work for the dog.
Instead, the stop whistle lets us get their attention and handle them from a distance to where they need to be. They can be re-directed left, right, back, over or in, and then be cued to hunt, or if still unsuccessful in finding, be asked to return to the handler.
In this context, the stop whistle interrupts the retrieve chain so the handler can assist the dog.
Hunting and the beating line:
If you’re hunting in the beating line or with a walking Gun, there might be times when there’s a pause in proceedings. This is usually when there are directions to be taken, or hesitation required while birds are flying out.
In the same way that we don’t want our dogs to have to return to our side during a retrieve, the stop whistle is crucial in ensuring that we’ve got our dog’s attention and that they remain paused until it’s time to move on.
Flushing and rough shooting:
When you’re rough shooting, you must stop your dog after they have flushed a bird or bolted ground game. This is imperative as it allows the Gun to take the shot safely, knowing where the dog is at all times.
Later, we will want to teach our spaniels and HPRs to ‘stop to flush’, where the flush cues them to remain still and steady. The stop whistle will be used to teach them this more advanced behaviour, so it must have been trained properly and thoroughly.
Does my gundog need to sit on the stop whistle, or can they stand?
This is a hotly debated topic that you must decide based on what works best for you and your dog.
When we stop our gundogs on the whistle, we want them to remain still until we give the next cue.
It is a common belief that a sitting dog is steadier than a standing dog. Logically, you may reason that more “effort” is required for them to get up and then move instead of just moving. But does this really make them any steadier?
Some dogs are very happy to offer a sit without hesitation. But some find it uncomfortable. And it’s likely that intelligent dogs see it as a waste of energy, for the stop should signify that their handler is about to give them another cue.
Our experience is that handlers who insist on a sit often put undue pressure on the dog. The result is often a slower, much more reluctant response to the stop whistle cue.
When you are working your dog out in the field, they are often in cover and on uneven ground, which may be wet, muddy, snowy, or prickly. More often than not, they will not want to sit in these conditions, so why waste time getting them to sit in a training scenario only to accept a stand in real life?
For that reason, it is much more productive to focus on the stillness of the dog than whether they are sitting or standing.
How to introduce the stop whistle
If you are just getting started with a puppy or young dog, or even an older dog who you have not done the stop whistle with before, the first thing you will need to do is to capture the stillness behaviour.
Here’s a quick step-by-step recipe for you to follow:
Step one
Place two marker posts about one and a half feet away from each other - this creates a zone or an invisible line, which you’ll later use to see if your dog is creeping towards you on the stop whistle. You’ll be on one side of the posts, your dog on the other.
Step two
Throw a treat to your dog’s zone/side of the invisible line and let them eat it. Immediately get another piece ready in your hand and flick your hand up in the air as soon as your dog is about to lift their head. This should attract their attention, and as they glance up at you, you can click and reward their stillness. Repeat this for a couple of repetitions, getting into a rhythm.
Step three
When your dog gets used to this new game, you can add your whistle cue. Throw a treat, blow the stop whistle, flick up your hand, click the stillness and reward with another thrown treat. Repeat this for 10 to 20 reps.
Step four
You can now stop using your hand as an extra visual cue. When you’re working your dog, you will still raise your arm, especially if you’ve stopped your retriever to redirect them. But for now, if they learn ‘whistle and hand’ means stop, they might not realise they need to stop on the whistle sound alone, which will be problematic when they are running away from you or are nose-down hunting.
So your new game will be throw food, whistle, click the stillness, throw food, etc. Keep repeating until you get fluency and consistency in this exercise.
Step five
Now you’ve got your initial stillness behaviour paired with the “peep” stop whistle, you can start to progress, adding distance between you and your dog. Remember to use the marker posts to identify your invisible line. Don’t reward them if they start to creep toward you; just reduce the distance again and build it back up.
The key problem handlers face when advancing the stop whistle
While a lot of handlers nail the stop whistle cue in training, at short distances and in unexciting environments, many often find that it’s a huge struggle to advance this into real-life scenarios.
Handlers are often shocked and disappointed at how quickly their dog can go from reliably responding to acting as if they’d never been introduced to the stop whistle before. And it doesn’t matter how hard or loud the whistle is blown, the dog continues doing whatever they were doing as if they’d gone completely deaf.
We need to understand that the stop whistle is effectively an interrupter given by the handler while the dog is engaged in another activity, mainly retrieving or hunting.
The issue is that these activities are what we have been selectively breeding gundogs to do for generations, and so they are highly intrinsically rewarding to our dogs.
Firstly, these intense hunting and retrieving instincts, which are part of your gundog’s genetic makeup, make it incredibly challenging to stop your dog mid-hunt, mid-retrieve, or mid-chase, as you are trying to override their automatic behaviour.
Secondly, if they choose to ignore your stop whistle cue, they are immediately rewarded, as they get to continue doing something they love.
Finally, it means that when they do listen to you and stop, you have effectively taken away their reward, and so the stop whistle cue can actually quickly become a punishment to our dogs.
All of these combine, with the additional requirement that you will usually be some distance away from your dog when using the stop, and it’s not hard to see why so many handlers struggle to crack the stop whistle and why even the best-trained dogs can “go off the whistle” over time if training is not kept up.
How to get a lasting and reliable stop whistle
Due to the combination of us fighting against our dog’s instincts, them being instantly rewarded when they ignore it, and the fact it can be punishing for them, the stop whistle can feel like an uphill battle to achieve and then maintain at a progressive or advanced level.
But there are a few ways to work around this.
Firstly, we must always try and ensure that the stop whistle cue has a strong reinforcement history right from the start of our training. If we can do this, we stand a much better chance of competing with their natural desires and if your dog knows that the stop whistle means something amazing is coming or about to happen, they will stop not only reliably but also with genuine enthusiasm.
Next, we need to keep up with our training. Even if you think they’ve got the hang of it, to prevent the stop whistle from becoming a punishment, we need to avoid overusing it as a day-to-day interrupter and keep refreshing our dog’s association with the stop whistle and high-value reinforcement.
Equally, if you don’t quite have the hang of it and your dog only stops some of the time, you need to be vigilant to ensure that they’re not being rewarded over and over again for not responding. What gets rewarded gets repeated, so all this will do is teach them that the stop whistle just means carry on!
Finally, alongside your stop whistle training, you can begin to introduce the concept that being interrupted while hunting does not mean the end of hunting.
This can be done by setting up some hunting exercises, clapping your hands together while they are engrossed, licking when the dog looks up at you, and rewarding by casting them off to continue hunting again.
If you have already introduced your dog to the stop whistle and are looking to progress, we have a few special stop whistle workshops coming up.
Our Hunting and Stop Whistle Workshop, like this blog, will look at how to teach a reliable stop whistle and how to combine this with hunting, which can be used not only as a distraction to strengthen your stop but also as a reward to keep your dog motivated and prevent them from seeing the stop as a punishment. For more information: https://clickergundog.co.uk/products/hunting-and-stop-whistle-workshop-all-breeds
Our Stop to Flush Workshop is for those who are progressing further with the stop whistle and are looking to move on to the next stage in training. This workshop will give you the knowledge and practical exercises needed to build a reliable stop to flush. For more information: https://clickergundog.co.uk/products/stop-to-flush