Keira: Fetch is still a work in progress at 6 years old haha. I had her reliably fetching for a couple of months a few years back, but unless I actually take her out to specifically to work on fetch (and toy interest period), it disintegrates quickly. She has zero natural desire to retrieve... or even to play, for that matter.
Ripley: Yes, but it was super easy. He's not always 100%, but for the most part he's very reliable. He's always had a good amount of toy drive and encouraging him to bring toys back with tug as a reward (and sometimes food) molded him into a good retriever.
Dance: Nope. I did have to teach her to bring things directly to me in the beginning, as she used to just bring things near me, but she still had a general idea naturally of how to retrieve. Now she's a retrieving maniac and will find anything she can in hopes of fetching it lol.
Journey: Yes, but like Ripley, it was pretty easy to teach her just using tug as her reward and sometimes food. Then eventually around like 8 months old it was like a switch just flipped and she reliably started retrieving 99.9% of the time because she wanted to just for the game itself and no longer cared about a reward for doing so. She still loves to tug too, but now she also loves to fetch. She thinks both games are fun. Whereas in the beginning the only reason she fetched was so that she could play tug after.
Who has a dog that will retrieve more untraditional objects like pens, paper, metal?
Dance will! She loves retrieving anything. I've thought about teaching Journey as well, but haven't so far.