Small victories, big feels — A Man and His Bird Dog

Other than the joy of chronicling this new pursuit for myself, one of my hopes for this blog would be to leave a breadcrumb trail for others starting out with a bird dog for the first time. And so training seems an important thing to discuss early and probably revisit from a hundred different angles, a hundred different times. I hope to describe more about what methods we’re putting into our bricolage of training philosophies and will say more later about Lincoln’s incredible month spent with the son of his breeder for a puppy bird camp training intensive which was well-worth the heartache of being without him for what seemed like the longest month of our lives. Today, I’ll just mention one of the better train-the-trainer / self-training systems I’ve stumbled across, Cornerstone Gundog Academy, in order to tell you about today’s small training victory which gave both Lincoln and me some seriously big feels. While ostensibly for Labs and Retrievers and waterfowl hunting (they are working on a bird dog / upland system to be released next year), their basic and advanced obedience modules also serve well for foundational bird dog training, even if some aspects, like the place board training we’re working through first, are arguably more applicable for situations relevant to waterfowl gundogs. I really can’t recommend their methods, content, and delivery enough. Heavily leaning toward positive reinforcement methods, they seem to have collected everything that has worked for us with Lincoln so far and distilled it into their training system. Perhaps one of their best features, all of their modules are accessible on demand via a mobile device for the sort of handy reference in the field and yard that you just can’t (yet?) get with excellent DVD package programs like Huntsmith and Perfect Start/Perfect Finish. If you’re intrigued by CGDA and are thinking of giving it a try for another component in your training arsenal, let me give you a nudge. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I’m very eagerly anticipating their bird dog academy to be released next year.

This weekend, I suddenly realized that my post-work hours were going to be soon consumed by autumnal darkness, so I started on Monday of this week with the process of moving Lincoln’s training to mornings, before his breakfast. Little dude was seriously pissed off at me on Monday. It was just terrible. Instead of my letting him in the kitchen just after his walk for our established morning feeding ritual (where he gets rewarded with his food for doing all of his basic obedience commands), I instead was now asking him to go to place on his place board and wait while I went into our house to get his food. Well, that was the main goal. The many steps getting to that goal were severely difficult and full of failure and frustration for both of us on Monday. He barked his head off at me for about ten minutes straight. I was sure I was making our neighbors angry and just hoped they’d forgive us if I got this under control in a few days. And sure enough, Tuesday was a little better and Wednesday and Thursday better still. The pic below is from today and I just couldn’t have been more proud. Lincoln sat AND STAYED on his place board while I walked into the house and got his food and came back outside. He just rocked all the other associated training steps this morning. It was amazing and I felt like I had just won an Olympic gold medal. He understood what I was asking that he do (which feels like 85% of the difficulty in training) and he did it, trusting that I’d be consistent and true to our pact that if he did what he now understood I was asking him to do (or NOT do in this case) that he’d get a reward. Well, today, I got the reward. I hope he was 1/2 as happy as I was. It literally made my day and week to have achieved the breakthrough with him. It was a huge training-induced dopamine infusion for both man and dog today. All before I showered, changed into work clothes and went to work...

And tonight, Heather and I toasted the achievement while our boy chomped on an antler. Life is good, friends and neighbors!