Labs are probably the easiest breed to train, assuming your labs fetch a tennis ball or toy, it is fairly easy to turn them into duck dogs.
But if you can join a retriever club or find a mentor, that would help more than any book or DVD.
Newbies often make mistakes that can ruin a developing dog.
Mistakes such as:
1) Repeating commands...teaching the lab that you are "background noise"
2) Creating a gun shy dog....very difficult to cure this human-made problem
3) Training in cold water...dog learns to hate water instead of enjoying it.
4) Creating a hard-mouth dog...a lifetime of every duck routinely crunched by fido
5) Creating a noisy dog...whining and/or barking as the ducks are circling overhead.
6) Creating a breaking dog...unsafe and out of control.
7) Getting mad as a trainer and falsely interpreting canine confusion as disobedience...leading to a confused retriever.
A noisy, breaking, hard-mouth, disobedient dog is a pain in the but to hunt with.
A well-trained, quiet, steady retriever makes duck hunting a pleasure.
