Thinking Outside the Methods Part One
Three Trained Behaviors
The greater pointing dog training community is obsessed with methods. There are old ones and new ones, popular ones and those that are relatively unknown, effective ones and well, less effective ones. I can’t think of any other training discipline where people get more wrapped around the axel promoting and defending their method camps. To be sure protection sport, retriever, fly ball, detection, etc people all have plenty to bicker about, but none of them rally around methods like the pointing dog folks.
As far as I can tell methods are systems of training that we’re developed or at least written down by some one, usually in the mid 20th century. Over the ensuing decades some of these methods have taken on a cultish hue. Please don’t get me wrong, I’ve studied and taken much from several bird dog training methods. I think they were born of good intentions and have been a net positive, especially before the internet age. Now that we all have access to pretty much everything that’s ever been written or thought about the subject of bird dogs available at our fingertips its easy to be overwhelmed and even more easy to get offended by folks that don’t share our opinions. Couple that with our passion for this avocation and our loyalty to our perspective sages, and it often all devolves into a war of the bird dog training methods, and then of course, the war within the methods. I have not been immune to any of it.
My personal remedy for this was just general curiosity and a compulsion to deconstruct whatever method I had in front of me to figure out if it was worth trying, why it worked, and how it worked. Somewhere along the line I had an epiphany; everything is reliant on principles. And then I started a podcast and mused on that particular subject for about six years. I’ll spare you any of those thoughts here and just provide a link https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/companion-gundog-podcast/id1560876353.
Outside of burning years of your life obsessing over the details of the canine psyche, you can just ask a few simple questions to help get a more objective look at the method you’re using or the one you’re considering using. Here’s a little of my internal dialogue.
Q: What am I trying to accomplish?
A: Simple, I want to train my bird dog.
Q: What does that mean?
A: I want a dog that will quest out in front of me in search of birds. Once it finds a bird I want it to point it. I want it to hold that position until I’ve moved in, flushed the bird, and fired a shot. I don’t want it to run off, and I’d like it to be under some measure of control.
Q: What behaviors do I need to train into my dog to make that happen?
A: Stop and stand, go with me, come to me. …I must admit, that this has never been a part of my own internal dialogue, but its an important question. Interestingly enough, this is the answer offered by every pointing dog training method. Some use slightly different language, but this is it. Not only is this the minimum requirement from a conditioned behavior perspective, its pretty much all we can possibly do to have an impact on how our dog performs its duties as a bird dog. This holds up across all methods.
This is a good place to stop and pick up later. Ruminate on this for a bit before starting on part two. Every bird dog training method is built on these three conditioned behaviors, stop and stand (aka “whoa”), go with me, and come to me. In the next part I’m going to explore where these behaviors come into play in bird work (in and around birds). I’ll probably talk about how they’re built the equipment we use to build them. This is a big topic, so expect a few follow on articles in this series.
