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Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Welcome to The Houndation’s podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about training during the off season and the tools we can all use to encourage better progress with our dogs, no matter how old they are. It’s pretty easy to let a good dog loaf around in the winter after a long hunting season, but a better approach is to just keep training while bird contacts and real world hunting experience can round a dog out in a way that no training ever will. There’s no denying that the time spent working on skills when you’re not toting a shotgun around is extremely valuable. This only gets more valuable when you understand what tools to use and when, which is something that is a bit more nuanced than it might seem on the surface, and is also something I’m going to talk about right now. Over in the white tail world, which is where I spend most of my time, there’s a common trend that has kept the lights on in a lot of men manufacturing facilities for a long time. It’s the get rich quick product mentality that promises big bucks with little effort. Unfortunately, the big bucks it delivers are usually to the folks selling the products and not the hunters looking for a shoulder mount for their man cave. To get a deer call to work, or a bottle of dope or a decoy or whatever, you first have to know enough about bucks to get within reasonable range of them. This is where the disconnect comes in. Products promise to draw in big bucks easily, but they won’t. And really, if they are going to work, you already have to figure out how to get close to bucks first. Now, if you can do that, you usually don’t need a lot of extra help. But if you do, being relatively close to a relaxed buck in an environment in which he feels safe goes a long way towards sealing the deal. There is a parallel to this in the bird dog world, and it really boils down to what training tools make the most sense for your dog, and then how you’ll use them to map out training sessions in the best way possible. Let me give you a quick example of something I read the other day to sort of frame this up. There is a bird dog thread on Reddit where folks will post questions to the general community. A recent post I saw basically said, and when I trained my seven month old lab with a dock insteadfall trainer. He grabs it perfectly in the middle of the body and then delivers it to me. Now with a bumper, he cigars it or grabs it by the rope and doesn’t quite deliver it the same way. Now, I’m paraphrasing there, but that was the gist of it. But here is a prime example of someone using two vastly different dog training products for the same task. The reason that his dog will grab the DFTs the way he wants him to grab real birds and the reason that same dog won’t do that with rubber or canvas bumpers is simple. The DFTs are literally designed to encourage a dog to grab them that way and to then not shake them a bumper. Well it’s not. Now. Does this mean that everyone should buy DFTs and not regular bumpers. Nope, But it does mean that understanding the tools you’re using is MOOI importante. The hard swinging head on a DFT is designed to discourage shaking, which it does well, and the shape of the body as well as the position of the hard plastic feet encourage a perfect hold every retrieve. A dog trained from a young age on DFTs has a jump start on a small but important facet of retrieving behavior. But that’s not to say you can’t train with standard bumpers and have a dog turn out just fine. You absolutely can. A billion dogs have been trained that way, and a hell of a lot of them made the transition from normal dummies to birds just fine. After all, dealing with real birds is a good way to mold behaviors as well. But look at it this way. If I take a lab puppy at eight weeks old and I cut the rope off of a dead fall trainer dove and then use that sparingly when I’m first trying to encourage a couple of three foot retrieves, that puppy is already learning how I want it to grab and hold a bird. If I can condition a young puppy to do something like that from the jump, I’m far less likely to have to fight with it later on. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s one small part of the puzzle that can snap into place early and stay there consistently. It plays nicely with natural hold and carry and the eventual behavior of holding and then delivering to hand again. All this can happen with a regular old bumper, but it’s sort of a matter of efficiency. Now, I’ll give you another example of training tools that seem all the same but aren’t. While the shed dog thing has quieted down some in recent years, it’s still not uncommon to see folks building that into their dog’s repertoire, which is great, But if you go to start a puppy on sheds, you have to think about what can go wrong. And what I mean by that is if you look at the shed dog training tools on the market, you’ll see actual deer antlers of various sizes and you’ll see soft rubber deer antlers. The difference there is important because you don’t want a dog to be scared of antlers if you want that dog to also love going out finding them with you. So, for example, a twelve veek old puppy that you introduce to antlers can see something that is the shape and color of an antler and then pick it up and it’s soft and not going to poke them in the eyes if they trip a little while carrying it. A training antler in this case is insurance against immediately causing your dog to develop fear over something that will hurt it or could hurt it. You’re just alleviating the possibility for a negative association. Now, that same puppy that picks up a real shed antler and trips and gets poked in the eye or in the chest can in an instant become averse to the very object you want them to love. Now, over time, a dog has to eventually start to pick up and carry real sheds, But if you can instill a love of the game before that, you’ve set your dog up on a better path to success. This is one of the things that I love so much about knowing so many really good professional trainers. They are constantly thinking about preventative measures so that bad behaviors don’t develop in dogs in the first place. And if you know anything about training dogs, you know why they are so obsessed with that aspect of dog ownership. And while a lot of trainers spend quite a bit of their time introducing dogs to gunfire and live birds and all the kinds of things that are important and need to be associated with positive experiences, they are also just responsible for untangling the messes that general dog owners create. It’s much better to not create those problems in the first place than it is to create them, let them solidify, and then try to undo them while also trying to impart other positive behaviors into them. You know, an ounce of prevention. As they say in the medical world. Training tools designed for specific tasks are your cheat codes for developing dogs efficiently and properly. But again, you got to know how to use them, and one of the things we get wrong a lot is not using them consistently. Two categories of tools where this is extremely are placeboards and e callers. When you look at trainers like Jordan Horrock and Jeremy Moore, you see placeboards playing different roles in their dogs’ lives, but you also see a very consistent form of usage. Once introduced. A placeboard is an anchored to training sessions and a symbol of so many things to a dog. But sitting calmly on a small elevated platform is an unnatural move for most dogs, and so their natural tendency is to try to not have to sit on an elevated platform and be patient. They’ll test you often, and the more you don’t hold them to the rules, the more they won’t follow them. So think about it this way. If you train Apoppy on a placeboard, which is a huge benefit to getting them to focus on you and to make eye contact and to show up to work. Then that placeboard needs to be consistent in the house and in the field and wherever else. You can’t demand they place perfectly while working hand signal drills at the soccer field down the road, but then not worry about them staying on their placeboard at home when the neighbors come over for a beer. It doesn’t work well that way, which means if you’re going to use a training tool like a placeboard, you kind of need to just commit to using it. And the same goes for e callers, which is a topic that drives me a little bit nuts for a lot of reasons. They’re arguably one of the best tools for keeping a handle on dogs, no matter how far out they roam or how much fun stuff they find to get into, but they are also easily the most misused tools on the market. This is because people often reach for an e caller to fix bad dog behavior that they’ve let develop in the first place. But punishing a dog for our mistakes leads to a couple of outcomes. The first is that the bad behavior often like recall issues won’t be solved in any other way than when you use the E collar and light a dog up. Then it’ll come back, but if you don’t, it won’t. That’s not a dog that’s trained to reall. It’s a dog that’s trained to recall when it gets zapped. Then you always have to zap it to get that response, though, which is no bueno. A different, but potential worse outcome with this scenario is not using the E caller during training enough and then over using it during hunting. I watched this with a hunting buddy of mine this fall, and what it did was confuses dogs. You’re not going to train a dog when it’s in the middle of a cattail slew and the roosters are flushing like mad. You might because you’re mad at the dog, you know, because he isn’t in range, tone them and beat them and eventually zap them more in a forty five minute session in the field than you would in a month of training at home. Now imagine that from the dog’s perspective, it finally gets to do the thing it loves the most, and now it’s also being corrected constantly. Great way to add a negative association and a lot of confusion to a situation that doesn’t need it. What training tools promise us is great behavior, but we don’t get that just by using training tools without any strategy or understanding of how they are to be used. In some instances, like with e callers, you’re also looking to use a tool sparingly and then have it as a backup to control bad behavior, but not something you want to have to rely on. Always. The same goes for treat training. I had to go on a mission to find a skin stable remover the other day after a bad incident with my younger lab and a barber ware fence in the middle of Nebraska in January, which is a story I’ll tell some other time. Now, while going through the aisles of a pet store near my house, I saw a woman with a callie looking type of dog that had a service dog vest and a muslon. The dog was terrified, had the look of a dog that was just not comfortable in its environment. It was cagey, suspicious, and while I’m just drawing conclusions from a twenty second encounter, very unlikely to be an easy dog to train. Now, in the time, we were in the same aisle, which is very short. I saw her give that dog three treats from her pocket. Now keep in mind that this wasn’t a twelve week old puppy. It was a fully mature dog and by the looks of it, had no shortage to access to extra calories. Now, maybe it’s a misread on my part, but it looked like the kind of situation where she was using treats way way too much. Now, this isn’t a huge problem in the bird dog world, but it’s becoming more of a problem as our dogs migrate from the backyard kennels to sleeping in between us and our beds every night. We look at treats like they are us doing a nice thing for our dogs. But you wouldn’t hand your kids, you know, a Snicker’s bar or a pack of gushers every time they were remotely applied to a stranger or didn’t act like little assholes. If you did, it wouldn’t be very long before you were doing yourself and your kids a huge disservice. Now, with dogs, the reliance on treats is a closed loop that always ends up in the same place. You don’t want to have to have a pocket full of milk bones out in the field to reward your GSP for every solid point he locks up on. You can encourage most dogs to do just about anything with the right food reward, but you don’t want them to only do that behavior forever because of the immediate promise of a treat. Think about it this way. Treat training involves well treats. A treat is not something that should happen super often, or the value of it won’t matter after a while. The balance will tip from a positive to a negative through overuse, and that’s not a crutch you want to have to lean on long term, because there’s no escape after a while. Now, if you’ve noticed by now, I’ve stuck to some of the most basic training tools. I haven’t gotten into dummy launchers and bird releasers and some of the really cool stuff that pro trainers really lie on. But the average joe usually doesn’t own, you know, in his entire lifetime. And those things are great. They follow the same rules as other training tools, but I’m also considering them sort of advanced, and that if you’re using a dummy launcher, you probably know the whys and hows behind the whole thing, but there is one last category I want to touch on, especially for the puppy owning crowd, which is check cords. If you want a cheap product that is extremely useful with puppy training, you can’t do any better than a check cord. They are generally just built with nylon rope and come in links of your average walking leash out to like thirty footers. They weigh almost nothing and puppies learn to forget about them almost instantly. They allow you to catch your puppy when it gets to the young teenage stage and decides it’s more fun to be free than under your control. They allow you to let your puppy roam, but also reel them in simultaneously using a recall command. This works on land and in the water if you’re at that point. Although I should say this, if you leave a check cord on your pup and let it swim and also happen to film it for social media, expect some serious hate, even if your pup is in six inches of water and in zero danger of drowning. I didn’t do this personally, but I know a trainer who did, and that trainer knows more about dogs than just about anyone I’ve ever met, and he’s also not really the kind of fellow to risk a dog’s life for clout on the gram, but alas, that’s the world we live in, and he got flamed for that little video anyway. Check courts are great, especially longer check cords, because they can allow your pup to have some freedom, but you still have absolute control over where they can go and whether they’ll come back to you or not. Now, not that this means anything, but I feel like check cords have been maybe the most valuable tool I’ve ever used training my last couple of pups, and I don’t know if there is a tool I’d lean on more for the first couple months of having a new dog. But they’re just like all the tools I already talked about and all the ones I haven’t mentioned. You have to know what they are good for and how to use them properly. This is maybe the biggest point I want to drive home, and it’s the last one. Training tools don’t make your dog better by themselves. Really, that might seem kind of like a weird analogy, but hear me out. I Look, this might seem kind of like a weird analogy, but hear me out, I look at training tools kind of like fishing tackle. I freaking love fishing tackle a lot. But if I spend sixteen dollars on a whopper plopper, which is a top water lure that just pisses off smallmouth in a way that is so fun, And then I take that lure and I throw it out in the middle of the lake where the depth is seventy feet and there’s no structure and no roaming schools of bait fish, that expensive top water is going to chugle on for a long time without drawing any interest, without me knowing where to throw it, which means me knowing where this mall mouth should be holding while I’m out there, that really cool tool for catching more fish won’t do me any good. Training tools for dogs are kind of like the same thing. Once we understand how and why you know, they are designed the way they are, we can put them to use in a better way. It’s kind of that simple. Think about this as we settle into the off season, which is when we should all be training our dogs so they aren’t bored and so they can level up, and then come back in two weeks for more talk about our four legged besties. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Houndation’s podcast. As always, Thank you so much for all of your support. Can’t tell you how much we appreciate it here at meat Eater. And speaking of us here at meat Eater, we drop new content over at the meadeater dot com literally every single day of the year, sometimes lots of pieces of content on the same day. Podcasts, articles, recipes, films, you name it. Whether you want to learn a new outdoor skill or you just want to be entertained and stave off some cabin fever, right now, we got you covered. 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