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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation’s podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about dealing with the attrition of hunting skills when we leave the training grounds and head out into the fields and on the water with our dogs. If you haven’t yet gone through what I’m going to talk about on this show, you’re either the best dog trainer on the planet, or you have the best dog on the planet, or you’re blissfully aware of the reality when you actually hunt. All three would be great, but only one is very likely. The truth is, we train our dogs for a lot of real world scenarios when it comes to hunting, but those skills, as sharp as they can be off the field, will often just dull up out of nowhere when the wild birds start flying and the guns start going off. There are some ways to nullify the atrophy of skills, though, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. You know that fellow who used to be a pretty big deal in basketball. He goes by a name Michael Jordan. Have you ever seen the video of his first dunk attempt in the NBA way back in the mid eighties. If you haven’t, I’ll give you a quick synopsis, but first I want to break down a few things. Jordan played in one thousand and seventy two games and scored thirty two hundred and ninety two points in his career, averaging just to shade over thirty per game, which, if you don’t know much about basketball, is a lot. His shooting percentage was right at fifty percent, which means that every time he put the ball up, it was a coin toss on whether the scoreboard was going to change. Maybe that doesn’t sound that great, but it is considering he was playing against all professional athletes, many of whom were quite a bit taller than him. Jordan is known for a lot of things, like being so fiercely competitive that he will bet on just about anything and is not a fan of losing, well anything. This mentality spawned a work ethic, when mixed with the hell of a lot of athleticism, led him to a pretty incredible career. The high points are many, but most folks, at least folks around my age, probably think of him during the nineteen eighty eight Slam Dunk Contest the All Star Weekend, where he went up against Dominique Wilkins to take the title once again, but this time he did it by leaping from the free throw line to solidify his reputation as Air Jordan. That dunk led him to sell about a trillion dollars worth of Nikes and helped him earn enough to be considered a billionaire several times over. By all accounts, Jordan had the mentality in the mindset to be a champion, and he was. But his first dunk attempt was a little less glamorous. In fact, he got called for traveling but went up for it anyway, and not only did he get stuffed by the rim hard, he hit the court like a sack of wet concrete and stayed there for quite a while. It’s hard to say how many practice shot he took in his life, but hundreds of thousands is probably not much of a stretch. He managed to miss thousands of shots in games and turn the ball over plenty. He wasn’t perfect, but he was, by most accounts, the best there ever was. Now, think about your dog. Your dog probably isn’t the Michael Jordan of dogs, even though in your heart you might suspect that actually he is. He’s not. Trust me, but that’s okay though, because if you’re listening to a rando like me talk about dogs, you’re probably not the Michael Jordan of hunters or of dog trainers. That’s okay too. We can all wallow in mediocrity together. We might not only share average lives but also average skills. But for some reason, it’s easy to expect more out of our dogs than we probably should. This is the first thing I want to talk about when it comes to our dog skills and how they translate to the field. The reality is they’re not perfect. While you can talk to hunters all day who will claim their dogs recover one hundred percent of the ripples and all that jazz, those hunters are very likely to be suffering from selective memory. There may be a few flawless performances each season, but more likely than anything is that as soon as we get back to the truck, our brains just clip out a lot of the negative memories. But it’s also true that we often expect too much of our dogs. Young dogs, first hunts of the year, different species of birds than usual dogs, in different environments, changing weather conditions. There are a lot of variables that come into play in the field and They all affect our individual dogs’ performances. The first thing that we need to do is factor that stuff in before we judge our dogs too harshly on his performance. If you have an upland dog that is pretty solid at flushing and retrieving birds and then you put him in a duck blind for the first time, even after training steadiness and blind marks and all that ducky stuff throughout the summer, you know what’s going to happen. That dog is not going to deliver a perfect performance. It doesn’t work that way. There’s going to be breaking or whining, or miss marks or a whole host of things that you just don’t want to see. You can practice and practice and practice, but it’s never going to be exactly the same as an actual hunt, just like how you could run five thousand rounds a summer through your shotguns, busting clays and still not shoot all that great on wild quail or rough grouse the first couple times you hunt them in the season. Giving our dogs some grace is a good idea because if we don’t, we instantly make things worse. I had a situation last year with Sadie where my buddy and I were bumping awful close to our three bird limits here in Minnesota, when she put up a rooster in front of me that swung hard to my right over a frozen lake. Now, I’m pretty deadly when they go straight away and somewhat deadly when they go to the left. But a bird that cuts hard to my right has made the best decision he could. I still managed to knock that rooster down on my first shot, and he hit the middle of that lake, stood up and started running. Sadie, who’s about four feet shorter than me, didn’t mark the bird because the cattails are tall enough to block my view. So I scrambled to the edge to point out the very alive but wounded rooster pulling his best roadrunner moves on the skating rink. I figured I was about to see one of those oh so sweet moments when your dog lays eyes on a rooster that’s running real hard and then takes off to tackle them, maybe fall over and slip on the ice and all that cool jazz. What I saw instead was a small black lab looking the wrong way while I frantically yelled and screamed back, you know, to her, in order to get her to look back and run the way that she’s been trained to run. If you want to know how to communicate with your dog, stark, raving lunatic isn’t the best persona to adopt. In fact, it was just a miracle that I saw exactly where that rooster went into the cattails before I went ass over apple cart and slid along on my face for a while. When I finally got stood up and got over there, Sadie had already taken my cue and was well on her way to rounding up that bird from a snowdrift. In the moment, I was like, well, I have the dumbest dog in the world, But in reality I had a dog that didn’t know where the bird was because she really couldn’t, and instead of calmly getting her attention and sending her in the right direction, I did everything I shouldn’t have. What looked like a lack of skills on her end was entirely a mistake on my part. Give them some grace because they are trying and they might not know you know what you want out of them or how to do something, but also pay attention to what they absolutely should know that they won’t do anyway, For upland hunters, this tends to manifest itself and recall issues a lot of the times. If you haven’t hunted with someone who has a dog that doesn’t understand anything about range, oh boy, just wait. There’s nothing more frustrating than a dog that just doesn’t understand any connection between it and the right distance to the hunter. You know, some of this stuff can be excused away through hunt jitters and excitement, but most of it is, once again an issue on our part. Is where it gets muddy though. If you deal with this, you have to ask yourself how much you trained it in them. If it was a ton and they disobey, you’ve got to get them under control. You know, it might be a one and done issue just from the excitement that they’ll shore up quickly throughout the first hunt, but if it keeps happening, it’s not actually an attrition of skills. It’s a light shining on what the skill level actually is. This is a big deal, and it’s something that every bird dog trainer understands. You train for realistic scenarios, then you go out and pay real close attention to the dog’s behavior in the field and on the water. This will show you where the holes are in your game, because they know that you can’t show up everything in the backyard no matter how many bumpers you toss. Now, another issue that happens a lot is confusion over wounded birds. Here’s the thing about this. You can set up as many hunt dead scenarios as you want with bumpers and wings and whatever else you know in the yard and the CRP field, in the woods wherever. The more you do this, the better off your dog will understand the job when that command comes out. But even Tom Docin, who has made more realistic training dummies than anyone, has yet to make a bumper that will run and hide and possibly fly if a dog gets too close to it. This is a skill issue that can only be resolved by working real birds in the places real birds live. But it’s also true that we often don’t do our dogs any favors on this front. I think about this a lot, and it’s one of the many reasons I rarely upland hunt with more than one other buddy, and never more than two or possibly three, which usually ends up feeling like one or two too many intends to result in me finding a reason to go hunt solo for a while. The more people and dogs we get involved, the more some dogs will lose their abilities to perform due to distraction. But where this gets untenable is when a bird is down. Now, a couple of good, seasoned dogs looking for a wounded bird is usually a gift because that bird is generally in trouble when the smart noses start to work it out. But what if you aren’t with a couple of seasoned pros, or what if your dog’s just never trained around other dogs. What if it’s just you and your dog and it’s second season and for whatever reason, the rooster you hit isn’t where he’s supposed to beat. This is where patience and a zen mindset comes into play, because it’s very easy to be frustrated with a dog that misses what looks like a gimme retrieve in almost all situations, even a hell of a lot of them that involve ducks, If the dog doesn’t have a good chance to use his nose, he’s not going to find the bird. When we send a dog into the thick stuff or a down rooster or rough or whatever and he doesn’t find it right away, our first instinct is to go in and look. I see this every time someone new when we’re in the late season cattails, and every time it drives me crazy because the odds of us spotting a down rooster about as low as the odds of cow waking up one day and just deciding he’s going to shave his mustache off. It’s not gonna happen. So we think our dogs are good at this stuff because in training they are successful, but in the field they suddenly aren’t. So we move in and add a whole bunch of scent and urgency to the scene, and that only makes it worse when that dog’s trying to nose up that down bird. Now, as a deer hunter, I’ve started thinking about how bucks really kind of just see with their noses, and I try to equate that to our actual vision. It helps me figure out where to hunt deer. But on the dog front, thinking about them using their noses that way just helps me visualize what they might need. So look at it this way. Your dog needs the wind and it needs time to work it. If you don’t give him both, he won’t do very well. If you send him in from the wrong direction, or you wade into the exact spot you expect the sun to be. It would be like trying to look for something that blends in really well while someone else shines a bright flashlight in your eyes every few seconds. Yeah, sure you might find that thing, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if someone wasn’t shining a frickin light in your eyes. But what if you don’t screw that part up? But your dog mostly stays where the grass is short and it’s easy to walk in and skirts the thick stuff where that rooster hit the dirt, Then again, that’s not necessarily an atrophy of skills. It’s a lack of skills. Your dog hasn’t learned that the thick stuff is where the magic happens, and he’s no dummy, so he’s staying where the living is easy. It’s back to training time there, but also time to encourage him in the right direction while hopefully the wind feeds him just enough to coax him into the morass again. Hunting with our dogs is a great way to see in real time the issues that need work during training, but it’s also a time for you to learn your dog and for your dog to learn you. Scratch that your dog already kind of knows how you operate, but not necessarily how you operate in the field. You might be a relaxed kind of fellow during summer time training sessions and then be a keyed up lunatic when the ducks starts circling, or the opening bell for the morning rings and it’s time to wade into the waist high grass for the day. Your dog is used to you in one aspect but maybe not the other, just like how you know exactly how good your dog is during training, but suddenly it’s like having a whole different dog when you go out into the field. That shit flows both ways, but we rarely look at it from the dog’s point of view. It’s kind of like how when you’re married for a while, it’s pretty easy to see the flaws in your spouse, while not so easy to see the good stuff that they do. With our dogs, we actually see that positive stuff during training because we can train to nearly one hundred percent success, but that isn’t possible while hunting and hunting is a blood sport with prey animals that simply don’t want to die, it’s a different beast from training altogether, and it require of us and our dogs something that we just don’t bring to the table when we are training. So let’s break this down again. Even though hopefully by this point of the season your dog has been in the field more than a few times and it’s starting to get things figured out, you have to expect some level of atrophy in their skills. It’s hard to pin down because it’s just sort of this ethereal reality where your dog’s skills actually live. But you should know what your dog has down really well when you get to the field. If there is some confusion when those skills come up, that’s okay. How they react and how they perform throughout the hunt or just the first few hunts will tell you a lot. There’s also the fact that they sometimes just decide to blatantly ignore you when they are having fun out there, which is a different issue altogether. That’s usually a dog that just needs more training and honestly, probably more time in the field, so they aren’t totally willing to risk it for the feathered biscuit. Every time you get out there. We owe it to them and to ourselves to be brutally honest with their performance and ours and to at least try to be fair to them about the issues that crop up, because they are there for a reason, and rarely is that reason because the dog is throwing up a metaphorical middle finger to you just because it can. They more often than not just lose their minds a little and often don’t know exactly what you want, or worse, they know what you want, but are totally perplexed in how to deliver that result to you. Getting angry or ignoring these moments has a snowball effect that won’t work in your favor later on. It’s best to be aware of that stuff now and except that you won’t view a flawless performance, but we’ll have a chance to help your dog get better with true on the job experience, And in that process we also have a duty to view ourselves pretty much the same light. What holes in our training game are blatantly obvious now? Or how well do we handle going two barrels deep a few times in a row without touching a single feather while our buddies snicker and make Stevie Wonder jokes. That’s how it goes, and it’s up to us to take those lessons and reframe them for ourselves and for our dogs. If we do, the atrophy and skills on their part will become less and less, and you’ll get to that sweet sweet spot with your dog where the mistakes are few and far between, and you’ll get to witness a peak dog doing what peak dogs do, which is something I hope we all get to see in our lives. So do that, Think about that, and come back in two weeks to listen to more talk about the dogs we love and how we can have the best life with them. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation’s podcast. I want to thank you so much for all of your support. I have never worked at a place where we had a better audience than we do here at meat Eater. We truly appreciate you guys showing up for us. You consume so much content and we love it. If you want more content, or you’re maybe missing something out of your life, maybe you want to just watch some films with the family at night, Maybe you need some new podcasts listen to on your drive to work. Whatever. The medeater dot com we drop new content every single day. There’s tons of good stuff on there go check it out
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