Whoa is a command that means stop and stand still. Many people consider a solid recall to be the most important thing to teach a dog. While a good recall is very important, I consider the whoa command to be more important. If I could only teach one command to a dog, it would be whoa. A properly whoa trained dog will stop when told, anytime, anywhere, for as long as needed. If my dog is off leash and running towards a road, I can stop her before she gets in harms way. A recall only helps if the dog is on the same side of the road as you! I call it an “emergency stop”. A well whoa trained dog will stop at any distance you need, whether it’s 4 yards or 400 yards.
A big mistake I see a lot of new trainers make is whoaing a dog into birds if they don’t stop on first scent. The problem is a lot of times these dogs aren’t fully whoa trained yet.
Here is a typical scenario that happens all the time. Someone teaches a whoa command in a low distraction environment like their house or backyard. The dog will listen in the yard, but isn’t to a level of training yet to listen under a higher level of distraction. For a bird dog there is NO HIGHER LEVEL OF DISTRACTION THAN A BIRD! Sorry for shouting but this is very important. It’s unfair to put an untrained dog into such a position and expect them to listen.
Here’s how it goes. The trainer works the dog into a bird, the dog doesn’t stop, so the trainer says “whoa”, the dog doesn’t stop, so the trainer says “whoa” again and yanks on the check cord, the dog still doesn’t stop so the trainer yanks on the check cord again and/or picks up the dog and puts it back where he said whoa. The dog moves again, and this scene repeats itself. The trainer set the dog up for failure. Now he’s administering physical corrections (punishment) in the presence of birds. THIS IS BAD NEWS! While some bolder dogs may tolerate this, many softer dogs will crumble under this sort of unnecessary pressure. If a dog smells a bird, then a correction immediately follows, through enough repetitions, you can classically condition the smell of a bird to mean punishment is on the way. The dog doesn’t know the command well enough under high distractions to know the correction was for non-compliance to the command. If a dog is expecting a physical correction everytime they are on a bird, its not uncommon for them to start avoiding birds all together (bird shy). I personally feel that whoa with birds shouldn’t even come into play until after the bird is flushed if you’re training to be steady to wing and shot (dog remains standing until released after the shot). I can see no reason to whoa a dog when he’s working a bird on the ground. I’ll let the birds teach them to stand still.
Here are a couple short clips I took of our rescue pointer Evie demonstrating the whoa command. She will stop when told at any distance under any distraction. She was about 70 to 90 yards in these videos. I can stop her at much greater distances and for longer durations if needed. We had to keep her in close and the duration short for the video. My point of these videos are to show that if your dog isn’t trained to at least this level of the whoa command, you’re asking for trouble telling them to whoa on birds and then correcting them for not.