Years ago, an ambitious truck dealership deep in the heart of the Great Lakes states ran an autumn advertising campaign which read, “If you want to make a great grouse dog, let him ride in the front seat of the truck and sleep close to him at night.”
I suspect that I covet a good companion pointing dog as much as anyone reading these words, but in transit, my dogs are safe and snug in travel crates. I have also, on occasion, had trouble convincing a significant other that several cuddling canines aren’t a crowd in the connubial bed.
But whatever the ad copy did for sagging truck sales or seasonal sleeping arrangements, it unwittingly makes an important selling point about the role of bonding in building a better bird dog.
From mallards marking a Mama minutes after escaping eggdom, to rec league Over 40 hockey squads comparing loose teeth in post-game rites of buddihood down at the Penalty Box Café, “bonding” is a connection made when rapport transcends “just being there.”
One of the traits for which serious gun dog breeders select is another “b” word, “biddability,” that innate quality of wanting to please, of taking readily to training, of naturally hunting for the gun. But breeding tractable animals means very little if the handler neglects cultivating – or better yet, celebrating – a bond with his or her dog.
Among the treasures I hold most dear is a sheaf of letters the late dog trainer Roy Strickland wrote in support of his classic paperback, Commonsense Grouse and Woodcock Dog Training, produced in collaboration with John L. Rogers. Page after page of that correspondence, covered in Roy’s scrawl, features comments such as “make a pal out of your dog,” “In order to make a first-rate hunting pal…,” “A light hand and a calm voice make lessons pleasant for both you and your pal…”
The word “pal” may seem dated, even maudlin. But for six decades, Roy Strickland trained some of the finest foot-hunting dogs in New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, including Burton’s Fleetfoot Ginger, the 1946 Grand National Grouse Champion.
People who knew him marveled at “The Way” Roy had with dogs. When pressed, however, he always shrugged and said, “I like dogs, and they like me.” For Roy, two generations before the advent of the “dog whisperer,” training and handling come down to being pals.
Strickland’s gun dog training was built around the cornerstone of shaping a quartering pattern. No “yelling or loud talking” as he would admonish, especially with youngsters. Because puppies enjoy our company, whenever one looked up from whatever had a momentary spell over him, Roy would give his trademark mouth whistle – soft but insistent – wave a hand, and step off in that direction.
“Teachin’ him to go back and fort’,” he’d explain to John Rogers, “makin’ it fun,” whenever they put puppies down for introductory “work.”
Even check-cording an older dog who’d not had the early shaping exercises was not to be tedium in Roy’s view. “You’ll enjoy just being with your dog,” urged Strickland in one of the letters penned just shy of legendary trainer’s 90th birthday. “Seeing him out there in front of you, learning to handle, learning to please you…When you have him finished, you will be proud of both yourself and of a dog all of your hunting partners will want to steal.”
Good vibes and tail wags all around.
A number of years ago, the new wave of canine behaviorists brought us “Alpha Dog Rollovers,” a tide ridden by a popular Trainer of the Moment who somehow got magazine editors to publish articles coaching us to parade puff-chested in front of our staked-out gun dog novitiates, actual rawhide chews in our mouths, thus demonstrating “pack dominance.”
Somehow we survived that nonsense, comforted by the thought of 89-year-old Roy Strickland, his pockets full of treats he called “cookies,” shuffling down his kennel runs, still making friends after all the years and all the dogs who had passed through his hands.
A long time ago, back home in Marion, Ohio, we knew a good semi-pro trainer named Albert Grimes who made fine drahthaar grouse dogs from a city address with a postage-stamp back yard.
Al worked for the water company. Since the statute of limitations has long run out on his cavalier treatment of the time card, it can be said that between calls, Al would swing by his home, leave the company truck’s door open so he could hear when/if the dispatch radio crackled him back to duty, and did obedience work with his dogs.
Grimes kept a loft of pigeons his neighbors fretted over and traveled fifteen miles after work to Kildeer Plains Wildlife Area to run his dogs on whatever birds the field trialers might have left.
“You gotta want to have bird dogs doing it this way,” Al would say, his dogs marking every post in sight as he stopped by the farm for a debriefing on what he’d found on the Grand Prairie that evening.
“Want to” is a basic tenet for anyone who would get the most out of his or her gun dog. Maybe it’s just taking the trouble to groom that good dog, clean his teeth, putting him on a proper collar and good leash and jogging or walking with him. If he’s a kennel dog, bringing him into the house each evening for what my old mentor Bob Thompson always called “bein’ sociable” is good for man, woman, and beast.
It’s important to plan ahead for situations that offer the chance to be with your dog without his being a nuisance or being in any sort of danger. And surely teaching him not to be a nuisance in certain situations is one of the most important foundational pieces of training.
To that end, we load that dog in the crate during cool weather for a trip for groceries. We make sure he goes along on runs for supplies in dog friendly establishments. We can put him at heel and watch a track, ever mindful of the starter’s pistol. Social media is full of photos of dogs snoozing in the shade or standing watch in the prow of a steady boat while their people fish. And certainly, we would have him work over one of those rawhide chews we haven’t had in our own mouths while we surf the web or watch TV. If we don’t enjoy the dog’s company enough to make room for him in our daily lives, then why do we think the dog might bother to look us up in the field?
In all these situations, though, the key is to maintain training. For example, if “heel” is part of your program, then “heel” means “heel,” cued once and maintained with a proper lead, collar, technique, and accountability. It is horrifying to see the faddish new harness collars on dogs all over our town, towing their owners down the bike path, sidewalks, or, as we saw this past Easter, up to the top of our local knob for a sunrise service overlook.
There’s no “heel” in that equipment; instead, it signals “pull.” If one needs help going uphill to church, that’s fine. But if a comfortable walk through the neighborhood or back to the truck after a hunt is the program, being hauled along by a dog conditioned to pull is nothing but a drag.
The end for all these means is establishing connections that matter. A pointing dog’s range that gets birds pointed and, ultimately, presents shots, is enhanced by those ties that bind. If we’ve done our socializing, our early obedience work, our quartering homework, as Roy would insist, or, better yet, have encouraged that kind of patterning from a dog bred to work in that fashion, then our dog will be swinging by at regular intervals, “checkin’ in without comin’ in,” as our local grouse hunting legend Nelson Groves used to insist.
And isn’t that the bottom line of effective gun dog range- in a hunting pattern that is “to the cover” and “to the gun”? Much of it is common sense. When quarters are close, we probably want the dog closer, too. When the cover widens or is more scattered, the handiest pointing dogs range out…while keeping a sense of our whereabouts without our “yelling or loud talking,” not to mention the abominable Acme Thunderer serenades that ruin a good day afield.
I grind my molars a bit when I read one of those “profiles” that maintain this or that breed gun dogs adapts particularly well to kennel life. The intimatation is that this strain of birddog is resilient enough or independent enough or whatever enough to spend the vast majority of its time amusing itself behind wire.
Having said that, absolutely some dogs handle that kind of confinement better than others. But to get the most from your companion bird dog, none of the breeds is a “great kennel dog.” The whole reason we invited early canines in from just beyond the firelight’s rim was because we and they were looking for a connection, a pack bond. Secure, easily cleaned, conveniently located kennels are useful and a perfectly fine housing arrangement for our bird dogs…if that dog also gets steady, frequent, purposeful, binding contact with its People that bonds.
Unless we have more than a water-bucket-poopscoop-feed-pan relationship with our dog, she’s unlikely to care where we are when we’re in the field, especially one salted with not only gamebirds, but incredibly tempting off game as well. Under those circumstances, without the proper connection to our dog, if we start at the truck and finish at the truck in the same calendar day, that’s about the best we can expect.
Horseback trial competitors back in the day turned this to their advantage. One of the old-time tricks to make a green-broke dog of modest range open up was to isolate him the week before the contest, perhaps in a darkened granary, shoving his grub at him like any other prisoner in solitary confinement. Come the trial, the scouts were put on the qui vive, the inmate was cut loose, and handlers, judges and gallery could lather up a lot of good Tennessee walking horses trying to keep track of a dog in a frenzy to be anywhere but right here.
But back to Nelson Groves’ notion of “checkin’ in without comin’ in.” That irascible ridge runner loathed a dog that lagged underfoot, often because some hack had…well…hacked at the dog to come her in.
“Hell’s bells,” he’d snort. “We can find the ones underfoot!”
Obsession with arbitrary, artificial “hunting close” is an impediment to class dog work. The most exciting days spent afield are those where a confident, connected dog ranges intelligently, wastes little time “where they ain’t,” and points ‘em where they are. And if walking up an “out on a limb” find that just about breathes fire doesn’t pluck your harp strings, then you’ve little shot of ever hearing the angels sing.
Strickland’s Boswell, John Rogers, had an expression for dogs that were merely “kept.” “Too long in kennel pent,” he’d tone, watching young dogs that barely could manage their own running gear, wacked-out wingnuts who couldn’t navigate the country, who sometimes were so intoxicated at being loose that we felt like we needed one of those box traps to gather them in for the night.
Many of those sorts of dogs that came to the farm for work were extremely visual, meaning that most of the stimulation or information they’d received while stuck in their respective kennel runs had been solely through their eyes. One such prospect had to be yard-trained inside an empty pole barn just to hold his attention. Any movement – tweety bird, blown leaf, swaying branch – and school was out.
Dogs like that seemed to take far longer to trust their noses and were much harder to make steady, so desperately did they want to eyeball the bird once scent was made. The well-worn credo of racehorse breeders, the one that says, “blood will tell,” held up for those from proven stock, and they made up into happy, hard-hunting grouse dogs. But until they got in touch with their handlers, and their handlers developed a handle/connection, they were simply erratic bundles of nose and nerves with not a clue how to put all of that quivering instinct and unquenchable drive to good use.
When we first came to this sport, there were still vestiges of stigma around birddogs kept as “pets.” A number of our acquaintances firmly believed that keeping a working dog in the house made him soft, perhaps even damaged his nose, surely blunted his “predatory instincts”!
Forty years later, the pendulum has swung dramatically the other way as most birdhunters want to share far more than just their hunting seasons with their dogs. In fact, they’re stone-cold convinced that a pointing dog living as a family companion, under clear leadership that strives for a mutual, abiding respect, is only a fuller partner in the field, casting “back and fort’” to make game, to make memories.
On a finger-smudged bit of torn yellowed steno paper, Roy Strickland, a man who went to the dogs and never came back, wrote these words: “There is no finer companion than your dog. He is even a relief from your human friends, as he does not talk and is satisfied to listen or just be with you.”
What more could we ask from a pal?