User:Lindsay Ridgeway/Reward-based Field Training for Retrievers/Disclaimer

Disclaimer
This book was begun by me, Lindsay Ridgeway, in July 2007. At that time, though I had been studying and practicing dog training for over three years, I had never trained a dog to any title, in field sports or any other canine sport.

Typically, one would want to read material like the subject of this book written by an expert with proven credentials.

Unfortunately, that was not available at the time this book was started. As of July 2007, there has never been a field champion retriever trained exclusively by reward-based methods, and perhaps there never will be. Many field trainers believe that it can't be done, and few are willing to make the investment to find out.

On the other hand, I did not want to wait until I've shown it could be done before beginning work on documenting my methods. By the time I have trained a successful field trial dog (if that ever happens), I might no longer have the time, inclination, and memory to explain what I've done.

Therefore, this book was started as a repository for my training notes. In the future, it might be a treatise in how not to train a successful field competitor, or, if I'm fortunate enough to succeed, it might be a record of how the job was done.

At the same time, by presenting this work as a Wikibook, I invite collaboration from others, and some contributors may bring far more knowledge and credentials to the material than I am able to. To the extent that this work becomes supplemented, edited, and vetted by more experienced trainers, this Disclaimer may eventually become merely an introductory note on the genesis of this book.