re: Chocolate Lab trouble/training suggestions

Somewhat
First you teach hold stationary (most important of all commands), second you teach walking/hearing hold, third you teach front finish and move to force fetch. Ppro is the best I have ever seen with the above process. I had a couple top secret tricks I used with success on difficult dogs. Would never advocate tug since it will create a sticky mouth with real birds.

thanks kemo. that does make sense. I will tell you that i stopped short of trying to teach many things in fear of ruining the training that i paid for.

Lot of good info here already about how to train, but to me one thing is missing.
Your dog needs to know the difference between hunting/ training and playing with kids. Some don’t think it’s possible, and maybe in some dogs it isn’t, but I’ve always been able to get the dog to differentiate.
When my kids were young I told them 1) no tug of war games, ever, and 2) they can throw stuff for the dog but they have to say ‘fun!fun!’ first, and never use bumpers.

After every training session I threw a couple of fun bumpers. Dog doesn’t have to be at heel, we jump around and get excited and he can run around with it and do whatever. It clearly is different from training.
And don’t train with objects the kids might throw. So for example, tennis balls and sticks are for fun, bumpers and birds are different.

My dogs have seemed to get that the things are different ‘games’ with different rules.
This may help a lot with a dog who is to be a family pet and a retriever.

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will go out and fetch them but will not for the life of her bring them to me.

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What you baws think my next step should be?

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Force fetch would be an end all solution. I had my 2nd Lab do this around 8 months and prior to doing FF but as long as she would pick up the mark I would put her on a check cord and when she went to veer off I would kind of re-direct her back to me and then give her plenty of praise. I also would just take her to a dry open field and send her on the mark and when she would come back and go to veer off I would just run like shite in the opposite direction hitting the whistle and once she got close I would either pick her up completely or getting the bumper from her and giving her lots of praise just re-enforcing that the end game was to return the bumper back to me.

There might be more/better solutions but this is what helped me get over that hump.