He never tries to catch things in his mouth and instead always tries to use his paws, which never fails to amuse me. My dad was a semi-pro goalkeeper, as is my youngest son (including an England cap for futsal) and Iggy seems to have the same skill set, so perhaps it runs in the family!
Something quite remarkable just happened. I was shooting my air rifle at a pine cones and bits of wood I had lined up along the back of a chair in my garden when Iggy came and sat beside me, watching intently, like, he really had his "game face" on. Then when I'd knocked all the targets down and I went to the end of the garden to pick them up, he ran ahead of me and started snuffling, digging and rooting around in the leaves and bushes behind the chair, trying to find the dropped targets, and when he found one he picked it up in his mouth and trotted around, ever so proud of himself (he wasn't so keen to drop it for me though and so I had to fight him for it, lol). Now, here's the odd thing. He is from a long line of gun dogs and field trial champions and his mum was a worker, but he has never been trained, yet he somehow instinctively recognised what I was doing, what (in his mind at least) was expected of him and, even more incredibly, he knew how to do it. Obviously working dogs are bred to have certain behavioural predispositions (ie: to chase, to guard, to herd, or retrieve etc) but those are natural traits which training then harnesses into specific activities, whereas he seemed to "switch" when he saw me shooting the gun, which is an unnatural activity that should not have an instinctive component (ie: it's not as if he got triggered by seeing a bird - it was definitely the gun and what I was doing with it). Absolutely fascinating.
