Feature Article
October/November 2007 Issue

The Wrong Foot
The season’s just begun…
are you unraveling all of your recent training success?
by Jason Smith

he saying has probably, officially, reached ad nauseam proportions, that it “takes birds to make a bird dog.” But it can also be those same b irds that will unravel a bird dog… via the bird hunter.

During the winter, it’s common practice to reflect on the season that’s just ended, perhaps sift through the hunting journal, and while reliving the glorious moments, jot down those things our dog didn’t do so well. We come up with a training plan for the spring and summer and resolve to fix the bad habits and glitches in our partner.

And we tackle them, too, one at a time. Breaking at the shot? Now he’s solid. Ignoring a cast? He takes it without question. Veering off on his marks and blinds? He lines them like a laser. A little deaf to the whistle-sit? Now he spins and plops his rear down, intent on following our next instruction.

Then we spend the last couple weeks getting the “stuff” ready, making plans for opening day and opening week, finishing up the final house duties so that come fall, everyone will know where to find us: chasing birds.
Another popular saying – this one from the world of business – is that the success of a company, or of an individual, comes down to attitude and aptitude. Your dog’s got the aptitude – as do we, if we’ve practiced our shooting – that’s what we’ve been training so hard on. But it can be the attitude with which we chase those birds we’ve been waiting so long to chase that can render all of the valuable training from March to September moot.

talked with professional trainer Charlie Jurney about this. He had just come in from working his last retriever
of the day at his Beaverdam Kennels (www.finisheddog.com) in North Carolina, and as he is with his dogs, he was calm and deliberate and to the point about what hunters may be doing in the field – perhaps without even knowing it – that is unraveling their recent training success. For Charlie, it comes down to our attitude in the field, obedience, and paying attention to our dog’s condition.

“Some hunters fail to keep the dog steady to wing, shot, and fall even when the dog has been steady for months in training,” Charlie started off. “This is usually because the hunter is so involved in the hunt/kill that he lets the dog become self-employed so he can shoot more.”

Just because a hunter may be anxious to finally be hunting, that’s no excuse for undoing all of the hard training work. “People will work so hard to get their dog under control, invent twenty-five new drills to get the dog steady, get four training groups together to get the dog steady, shoot flyers in front of the dog to get the dog steady – and then they start hunting and get a chance to kill a double, and instead of shooting one bird and letting the dog pick it up and come back, they start banging away. They take their eyes off the dog, the dog breaks,
and by the time the break has occurred, the foul is done, and the dog is free to go.”

And not enforcing that steadiness, something we’ve worked really hard at establishing, is a slippery slope for the dog’s other skills. “Obedience typically deteriorates at a parallel rate,” Charlie continued. “The dog thinks, ‘Well, if you’re not going to get me on that, then you’re probably not going to get me on heeling from the truck to the field, and you’re probably not going to fuss at me too much if I go visit one of your buddies and hang out with him for a few minutes.’ Meanwhile, you’re sitting there, calling, ‘Here-here-here-here!’ and the dog doesn’t come.

“In training, we won’t tolerate that, but in an effort to possibly kill a few more birds, we don’t take the time to go across the field and correct the dog when he needs to be corrected. What I tell everybody when they take their dog hunting, especially on opening day, is you’re either going to hunt, or you’re going to go train your dog – you’re not going to do both.” He suggests “team hunting” in those early days, where one person handles the dog and the other shoots; after a time, the duties can switch. But this way, Charlie said, “the dog always has a close eye on him, and he doesn’t learn to be disobedient or learn to break.”

hunter’s attitude around birds not only can counteract the dog’s training and skills, but it can also allow the dog to get into trouble – sometimes dangerously so. “Each year, I’ll get a phone call from somebody where a dog died during the hunt,” Charlie said. “It’s always on opening day of dove season, it seems like. They’ll start hunting, shoot a few birds, the dog starts to get heated up, and once again, that passion to shoot the bird takes over. The guy will watch the dog, but he gets so involved, he doesn’t keep up with the details of what’s going on with the dog. The head’s down, they’re panting heavily, they’re refusing water – all these signs are saying that this dog’s in trouble, he needs to get cooled down quickly or he’s not going to make it.” Charlie paused and let that sink in.

“On a normal opening day dove scenario for us, it opens at noon, but birds really don’t start flying until between three-thirty and four. But guys will sit out there in the sunlight for three or four hours, and just have the dog sit there in the heat until the hunt really begins. And by the time it gets to going well, the dog’s already spent most of his energy and most of his reserves and lost most of his hydration on top of that.” His next pause spoke of having to hear that dreaded phone call one too many times. “There aren’t enough birds out there worth your dog.”

What about some of the little things hunters may be doing? With pointing dogs, pro trainer Ronnie Smith says that hunters should take a moment when they reach their hunting destination to heel the dog for a few minutes and get connected so that he doesn’t spend the first 20 minutes running the edge off. I brought this up to Charlie, but he had a slightly different take.

“With retrievers,” Charlie said, “I tell everybody to leave the dog in the crate until it’s time for the hunt to actually begin. A lot of guys want to socialize prior to the hunt, which is part of hunting. And then they get the dog out, show him off a little bit; but in doing that, they’re burning up energy the dog’s going to need later on. So we like to keep them crated until it’s time,” but as Ronnie Smith suggested with pointing dogs, Charlie continued, “and then we heel them directly into the field to where we’ll be sitting to hunt or the pheasant field where we’re going to start. If we have trouble with the dog being obedient there, we put him on a leash. I don’t ever have a problem putting a dog on a leash in the field just to maintain control over him. If a dog is having a breaking issue, stake him out when dove hunting. Still let him make the retrieve, but release him off the stake versus letting him break. That maintains some modicum of control there.”

t all comes down to our expectations with our retriever, and keeping things consistent from the training

season to the hunting season. “You need to set your standards and then maintain those whether you are training by yourself, you’re training with your local hunt club, you’re training or running at a hunt test, or you’re hunting – the exact same standard should be maintained all the time. And that keeps the dog’s vision and mindset of what is expected of him very clear. Those black-and-white rules make it easy for him to understand what he’s supposed to do.”

In other words, we’ll need to decide if it’s better to loosen up during the training season and be okay with not-so-precise performance, or we’ll need to buckle down during the hunting season and make sure the dog is behaving the same way he did when we didn’t have a gun in our hands. That’s where our attitude around wild birds during the hunting season becomes so important… as in, how important is that bird? There’s not a right or wrong answer to the question – but it’s unfair to the dog if we take his inconsistent behavior out on him, either in the form of discipline in the field, or in training him to be absolutely precise in training when we know darn well we’re going to let him slide during the hunting season.

One clear sign to the dog that we are probably not going to enforce the same standards in the hunting field as we did in the training field is if we used an electronic collar during training, but then refuse to put it on the dog when it’s time to go hunting. “Many people don’t want to put an e-collar on their dog while they’re hunting. People have said to me, ‘Well, we’re going hunting, I really want him to have a good time.’ But that’s the dog’s uniform to go play. If you don’t have your dog excited to see the collar, then you missed the boat somewhere in training.”

For Charlie, hunting without the e-collar on the dog – particularly when the dog is conditioned to it and knows that he gets to go when he has it on – is just not worth the risk when confronted with the myriad dangers in the hunting field. “Just like driving your car without any insurance on it, why would you take your dog anywhere without that control mechanism in place? For me, it makes the hunt more enjoyable, and it makes the dog safer, knowing I have that control, especially when hunting near roads.”

Attitude and aptitude. Our attitude in the field when it comes to bagging birds will, a lot of times, be the determining factor of our dog’s aptitude when it comes to using those skills we’ve spent a sizeable chunk of the summer honing. Maintain a consistent attitude in both training and hunting – as difficult as it might be when those first birds of the season get up – and the dog will put his hard-earned skills to productive use.

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