Guys, thanks for these insights and opinions on force fetching. I'm getting a Lab soon and it will be fairly far along in training, including ff, I'm told. In what little I've read, this is a contriversial issue with some claiming it's the 'only way' and others hard over against it. I think one thing most seem to agree on is that retrieval training is a fundamental milestone in the dog's training and a building block to more complex training.