Training your Irish Water Spaniel
Irish Water Spaniels are intelligent, athletic, willing partners in life. They want to be doing whatever you are doing, so they are not kennel dogs, but must be in the home. They also require basic training and ongoing guidance, lest their high intelligence gets them into trouble. Whatever you are doing, they want to be doing with you. They are successful in many dog sports! Enjoy scrolling through the examples below!
Obedience Trials
Irish Water Spaniels enjoy success in obedience trials, where they compete in routines including heeling, retrieving, jumping, distance work and signals.
Hunting/Hunt Tests/Field Trials
Irish Water Spaniels are a versatile hunting breed, able to serve as both waterfowl retrievers and upland game hunters. Thus they are able to compete in both retriever and spaniel hunt tests, and retrieve field trials.
Dock Diving
With their love of the water, Irish Water Spaniels excel at the sport of dock diving!
Photo by Richard Liebaert
Nosework
Nosework (also referred to as scentwork) is new sport in the dog world based on the work that bomb and drug dogs do: search for a particular scent and alert on it for their handler. In the sport of nosework, dogs learn to alert on essential oil scents like birch, anise, and clove. It's becoming immensely popular as the dogs love it and it poses fascinating scenting challenges for the teams.
In this photo, Patrice Dodd, a club member and nosework judge and exhibitor, handles her IWS Carlin doing an exterior search.
Tracking
Irish Water Spaniels excel at scenting sports. One is tracking, a sport modeled after canine search and rescue. The dog tracks human scent for various distances, changes of direction, and ages (at the beginner level, 400 yards, 3 turns, and 1/2 hour old). Click below for an article on starting tracking training with IWS!