Avoid Being Embarrassed by Your Gundog

My Dog's First Hunt Was Not The Experience I Was Hoping For

The first hunting dog I ever trained was an English Springer Spaniel named “Ruger”.  To be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. A professional dog trainer had worked with Ruger on upland hunting, and I was trying to do the waterfowl training to the best of my very limited abilities.  I thought I had done a pretty good job by piecing together a few bits of knowledge from YouTube and what I had seen other people do.  I truly believed Ruger was ready to hunt waterfowl, but boy was I wrong. 

For our first hunt together, I decided to go with a waterfowl guide service in the Mississippi Delta. Ruger and I were paired with a few other guys and set out to hunt a flooded bean field that had held some mallards scouted the day before. Less than two minutes before shooting light, just as we were loading our guns, massive flocks of mallards began dropping into the hole. We were all excited about what likely about to be the best hunt of our lives.

Our guide gave us the “thirty seconds” warning, and I was so excited to pull the trigger as birds continued dropping in. At that exact moment, Ruger took off.  He bolted into the water, flushing up over a hundred mallards at once.  I stared, in disbelief, frozen in my disbelief. It was now shooting light, and birds were still trying to drop in, but they kept flaring off of the white and brown Springer Spaniel “flushing” around in the decoys.  

No Matter How Hard I Tried, I Couldn't Get Ruger Back

I was beyond furious. To make matters worse, I couldn’t get Ruger to come back.  No matter how hard I called, how loud I blew my whistle, he just was not having it.  The guide told me I had to get control of him, so I walked out into the decoys to catch him. I put him on a leash and stood behind while the other guys shot a handful of ducks that morning. He ended up with a few retrieves, but I left feeling so defeated and embarrassed.  What could have been a hunt with early limits for everyone turned into only shooting a dozen or so birds, all because of my dog. 

What could I have done differently?  Well, I could have done dozens of things differently, to be honest.  Most importantly, though, I could have known more about how dogs learn and the fluency required to teach a dog to remain steady and recall in all circumstances.  Ruger was steady in our little training field.  He was steady when I threw dummies, even when I shot off the handheld launcher. He was steady when multiple dummies hit the water, and he was steady when I blew a duck call. Even more impressive, Ruger was steady to live pigeons when training at home!

That said, Ruger had never seen a duck. He had only been trained at three locations his entire life, and he had never been to any true hunting areas.  He had never heard three or four people blowing duck calls at the same time. And, as a flushing dog, he had never seen more than one bird flapping its wings at a time.

Ruger was also great at recalling with the simple distractions at our house. Whether it was our other dogs, the neighborhood children, or a simple denial retrieve with a dummy, I could get him back. But our recall experience never went beyond this. He had never truly been tempted beyond his desire to come back to me.

All of this lack of experience contributed to our debacle on that Saturday morning. My hunting retriever had acquired the skills of steadiness and recall, but they were not yet fluent.  I needed to continue to teach him steadiness and recall at multiple locations, with multiple levels of stimulation, until I was confident that he truly understood that he had to wait for me to send him no matter where we were or what was going on around him.  

I Committed To Never Getting Into That Situation Again

My lack of knowledge about the entire process of training a hunting retriever was ultimately what failed us that day.  This experience drove me to dive in, headfirst, to learn more about training gun dogs.  I never wanted to be embarrassed in that way again!  This experience is also one of the reasons we included the "How Your Dog Learns” module inside Cornerstone Gundog Academy.  Our team wanted to help first-time trainers avoid the embarrassment that I experienced with my first gun dog. We wanted people to have an in-depth knowledge about how their dogs were learning instead of just throwing out a few drills and calling it a day.

I didn’t take Ruger back to the duck blind that season.  Instead, I really worked on the fluency of his steadiness and recall until they became “generalized” behaviors.  The following duck season, Ruger was a fully-trained duck dog, and I was not worried about being embarrassed. In fact, he did so well that one of the clients at the same waterfowl outfitter offered to buy him, on the spot, during a hunt!

Ruger's shortcomings the prior season weren't his fault, they were mine. My lack of knowledge when it came to understanding what my dog was and was not capable of handling put us both in a tough situation. Don’t let your lack of knowledge about the training process hinder you from reaching your dog’s full potential, like I did. Our dog training program can help you avoid the pitfalls often faced by first-time retriever trainers. To access more information on our available program and training options, follow the links on the right side of the page!