Pointing Dogs Made Easy by Steven Mulak

POINTING DOGS MADE EASY:

How to train, nurture and appreciate your bird dog

When I talk about this book, I tell people that I am responsible for everything except the title. In truth, the working title for this book was The Pointing Addiction, but the word “addiction” sent up a red flag at the publisher’s office. I was persuaded we could sell a lot more books if we changed the title. And they were right: To date, none of my books has sold anywhere near what PDME has realized.

I wrote Pointing Dogs Made Easy because I believe a book on dog training techniques does not have to read like a text book. I tried to cloak instruction and tips in entertaining prose, and believe lessons are more digestible that way. The first excerpt below is an example of my non-instructional instruction. There are recommendations and some strong opinions in here and even an original theory (See Chapter 8, Life Cycles and the Complete Bird Dog) all of it immersed in stories of my own successes and failures with bird dogs.

The success of this book has a great deal to do with the fact that I am not a mass-producer of bird dogs. Books written by professional trainers are usually inappropriate for the amateur, sometimes profoundly so. Training dogs one-at-a-time is an altogether different game that requires a much more personal approach, and the best compliments I’ve received on PDME are addressed to that fact.

The other aspect of this book that makes it unique among dog training books is that I treat each dog as the individual he is. I’ve been around dogs long enough to have long ago realized that the only “typical English setter” is one that you don’t know. Once you get to know a dog—any dog—it becomes apparent that he is different from all the others. They are each individuals, and my training philosophy addresses and celebrates that uniqueness.

          I had a lot of fun writing this book, mostly because I was able to compile all the good stories I had been telling for years about bird dogs. Whenever I’ve been asked to do a reading, I try to select a passage that is sure to make the audience laugh, and, in that respect, I’ve always succeeded. The second sample from the book that I’ve attached is one such passage.

          This book is available from the publisher, Countrysport/Down East. I’ve also seen it for sale in a dozen places on line and at the Orvis store and at Kittery Trading Post, (Not at L.L. Bean, though. I’ve never seen any of my stuff in the book section Bean’s, in spite of all the good things I have to say about that company.) As with all my books, if you’d like an autographed copy, please contact me. As often as not, people buy books for someone else, and I’ve been asked to write something nice about that person in the flyleaf. I’m always glad to do that sort of thing.

(Excerpt from Pointing Dogs Made Easy, chapter 4, Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks)

          "On retrieving alone, any bird dog can earn his keep." Among hunters, you won't get many arguments regarding the validity of that sentiment. The worst bird dog that ever wagged a tail certainly has more ability to locate a hiding cripple than you and me and a dozen other fellows crawling around the covert on our hands and knees, peeking under every bush and deadfall.

The retrieves that bird dogs make on TV outdoor shows make for lovely pictures. Yet, to a dogless hunter, those same shows make retrieving dogs appear as nothing more than a frivolous luxury that he can easily do without—Anyone, after all, can be his own retriever so long as the birds are centered and fall cleanly on open ground, as they always do on TV.  Ah, but in the real world, no hunter is as consistent as he would like to be. Hunters make mistakes.  Retrieving bird dogs correct them.                          

     There is a game that I play in the back yard with my dogs. It's fun and good training at the same time. The dogs are told to sit while I walk the far end of the yard, mostly pretending to plant a pheasant wing in any of several places. (They don't seem to be clever enough to watch closely and see where I actually hide the wing.) Once done, I walk to a distant spot and call them to me, make them heel for a few steps, then tell them to "Find dead." There ensues some wonderful competition in what is a high-speed search, and often times a bit of "In-your-face" bravado as the winner brings in the wing. After a while, I'm sure the wing smells of nothing more than dog spit, but the main idea of the game is that each dog is using his nose competitively. Along the way, the game gives me a chance to enforce a dozen different field commands.

     It same lesson can be applied to hunting: When you drop a bird, put Sparkey at heel and go immediately to where you marked the bird down. Make the dog sit for a few seconds – hopefully that will calm him down a notch or two. Then, with all the calm you can muster, say "dead bird", or whatever command you use.  In his early training, this phase might be accomplished on a leash to give the dog the idea that he should, at least at the outset, search in a short radius around you for the scent.

     Because Sparkey needs to be calm, you  need to be calm. You might not realize it, but the dog is taking clues from you, and if you're excited, he figures there must be something to be excited about. Letting Sparkey break point to make the retrieve gets him pumped up at the exact wrong time: He needs to be methodical about that retrieving business.      

"Fetch" should be the all-encompassing command—fetch means "Do the whole thing right". I've caught myself saying "No!" when the dog drops the wing she's retrieving.  The command that accompanies the replacing of the wing in the dog's mouth should be "fetch".

          Some bird dogs don't need to be taught. You throw a ball, Sparkey chases it and brings it back to you. You can keep throwing the ball until your arm falls off and he'll keep running it back. It doesn't take the same dog long to figure out that when you shoot a bird, his job is to find it and bring it to you.  Sparkey—and this goes for most Sparkeys—loves to play fetch.

          Having said that, I need to say this:

A "fetch" command is useless unless the dog has been force trained to retrieve. Otherwise, it's like an "eat" command when you put a bowl of food in front of him—If he feels like eating, you don't need a command.  If he doesn't, you can stand there and say "eat" until next Sunday, but he probably isn't going to obey. You haven't taught him to obey “eat" any more than you've taught Sparkey to "fetch" by throwing the ball that he wanted thrown in the first place You don't have a command, you have a cheer.

My setter Stella was Sparkey with the ball.  She never needed to be taught, and retrieved every grouse and woodcock I shot over her during her first season. But I have a photo sequence of her taken in December of '89: That's her, swimming across a river and climbing onto the shelf ice on the other side. That's her, too, walking to the black duck I had shot. And this is her, looking back at me with an expression that says, "You want me to fetch this? Are you kidding?" 

          The photos that I don’t have on that sub-freezing day are of me walking well upstream and getting wet anyway in order to make my own retrieve of that duck.     

A dog that has been force trained to retrieve will fetch anything he's told to—a goose, a pheasant, a beer can, a rock. Further, the process of force training produces a series of routines that can immediately be used as a fast one-minute refresher course on a non-performing dog in the field to get him back to par. Although I haven't had a lot of luck teaching it, the NAVHDA folks have a step-by-step method that has worked for some of my hunting partner's dogs.

          I just wish I had missed that duck.

(Excerpt from Pointing Dogs Made Easy, chapter 6, Care and Maintenance of the Athletic Hunting Dog)

Many dog owners like to brag about their dogs being “briar busters," the inference being that the dog has a lot of "heart" and displays the admirable trait of "eagerness to hunt".  Since most dogs eventually outgrow their kamikaze tendencies, a puppy's willingness to plunge headfirst through thorns in truth indicates only that he has a lot to learn.

During her early years, Amy was a notorious briar buster. When it came to thorns, she didn't seem to give a damn.  Her coat was not thick, but she had the other prerequisite - a thick skull.  By the end of the hunting season most of the fur on the fronts of her legs and chest had been replaced by scar tissue.  No kidding.  If she had been made of metal, she would have been very, very shiny. 

Once, during her second season, a briar cut the tip of her ear. No big deal, I thought, and we kept going. But each time she ran a step, the ear flew around like a piece of laundry in the wind, and the clotting that would have happened in any other small cut never took hold. Within five minutes her head and shoulders were covered with a fine mist of blood. Leaves and bugs were stuck to her in a big gory mess. She looked like an extra from a canine horror movie.

I got her home and washed her down in the cellar set tub. Using gauze, I bandaged the ear tip, but I was reluctant to use adhesive tape.  Anyone who has ever pulled a band-aid off a hairy forearm knows how excruciating that sort of pain can be - It's got to be the same for dog fur.  So instead, I used an Ace bandage. I carefully wrapping the dog's head so that the ear was immobilized, and there was just the smallest piece of adhesive tape in actual contact with her fur. Amy curled up on her bed in the cellar and looked up at me with love in her eyes. Even Susan made a non-sarcastic remark about me being a considerate dog owner. For one fleeting moment, I felt like Saint Francis of Assisi.

What a fool.

Two hours later, I went back into the cellar to see how Amy was doing.  As is the wont of all dogs with bandages, she had pawed at it until it came off. Of course, she started shaking her head. Of course, the cut re-opened.  The cellar floor and the bottom half of the freezer and the washing machine and the clothes dryer and my work bench —everything—had an atomized coating of blood spatter on it. A casual observer might have concluded my cellar was a place where I regularly slaughtered pigs with dull implements. 

The milk of human kindness instantly went sour. Amy got a much less gentle second wash down, then there was an ample use of adhesive tape in the re-bandaging of her ear.

But that's not the end of the story. With one ear taped over, she had trouble with directional hearing, and for the next week of hunting we had a great many "discussions" about our difference of opinion regarding her range.

And then, when the adhesive tape started to shrink a bit, I noticed Amy's eyes seemed to be open very, very wide. It became an expression she wore. Until I re-taped the bandage, there was nothing in the world that she resembled quite so much as a dog that had been electrocuted and lived.

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This site was last updated 06/07/06