It is our goal to provide a welcoming and fun training environment with the intent of helping our members fully realize the potential of their versatile hunting dogs as companions and hunting partners. Our intention is to facilitate positive training sessions and demonstrate techniques to assist in the training of both handler and dog so together they may reach their full potential as a hunting team. We emphasize hands-on training for the inexperienced to the seasoned handler because we believe we can all learn from and help each other.

Why Volunteer? Volunteering not only helps the chapter, it also gives you the opportunity to learn along the way. You will meet other experienced chapter members and by watching dogs in the field you can pick up valuable observations about dog behavior and tips on handling skills. You will create friendships with fellow members that could lead to training partnerships for years to come. If you come to our tests, you will hear the judges read the scores and hopefully have a better understand of NAVHDA judging criteria.

Chapter training activities are for you and your dog. In the short time that we may work with your dog, our focus is actually on showing you how to train your dog so that you can progress together in achieving your training goals. Dogs have tremendous capacity to learn – we just have to figure out how to communicate to them what we want. The ultimate goal is for dog and handler to function as a team when hunting and to enjoy being together whatever the activity. Training sessions are also a great place to meet other members with common…

About the NAVHDA Testing System NAVHDA provides an accurate, complete performance evaluation on each dog tested. Valid, meaningful tests for versatile hunting dogs must be conducted in an environment that reflects actual hunting conditions, and they must test the important qualities of a good versatile dog. Judges must be knowledgeable, consistent and objective, and all testing and evaluation should reflect the extent to which dogs are productive hunting companions. NAVHDA tests have been designed with these requirements in mind. In addition, our database provides an accurate, searchable, and complete performance evaluation on each dog tested.