The Good Old Days
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By Chris Robinson
Get a group of sporting dog, hound or terrier people together, particularly those who have hunted with their dogs, and after a canooper or two (or three) of some adult beverage, the conversations almost invariably turn to how things were in the “good old days.” The days were always sunny except when we needed clouds and storms for waterfowl. There was an abundance of birds that flew faster or bunnies and jackrabbits that ran a hole in the wind. The guns shouldered truer. The dogs were flawless in their retrieves, flushes and points.
Well, I hate to be the one throwing cold water on these rose-colored reminiscences but I’ve been afield or in the marshes during what most people would consider to be at least some of the “good old days,” and I beg to differ with a lot of those idealistic views of bygone days–the days when we actually qualified, to use an old phrase, as “callow youth.”
Many years ago when I asked my dad about his “good old days,” he said that there were some fine times. However, he quickly qualified that by adding that there was little about that period that was consistently good and since he lived to the ripe old age of 97, he had seen plenty of both the harsh realities and the occasional good times of those years. He said that when he was growing up, there was no central heating, no electricity, no indoor plumbing and transportation was by horseback or horse and buggy. The leading causes of death were influenza, tuberculosis, polio, pneumonia and dysentery. There were virtually no sophisticated drugs–sulfonamide was not in widespread use until about 1938 and penicillin was not widely available until after World War II. For most medical problems, human or canine, how strong the person or the dog was usually determined whether or not they survived.
I, on the other hand, have been using the various automotive variations on the internal combustion engine for transportation since I was legally permitted to drive. My relationship with horses has been as pets or as my equine partner in the sport of show jumping or when they provided the thrill of pure power and speed of a Thoroughbred galloping or breezing. The only time I ever used a horse for transportation where it was a necessity has been on those occasions when I was judging pointing breed hunt tests. I have never known a time when the house did not have central heating, electricity and indoor plumbing. Vaccines for polio, influenza and other diseases have been available since I was a kid as have been a wide range of antibiotics and other medications designed to combat diseases or conditions and my dogs have virtually the same sort of sophisticated medical treatment available to them as people.
So, as much as I enjoy the remembrances of the past that re-surface after everyone gets into their cups a bit, I know those rosy memories are selective and when you take off the glasses, a much different set of images appears. Let’s take, for example, the equipment that was available in the “good old days” starting with the clothing we used. Only a true masochist would want to return to those days of uninsulated waders and hip boots, or thick waffled-cotton underwear that produced cascades of sweat whenever you walked more than a few yards followed by hours of freezing in damp clothing. While the wool longjohns in those days kept you warm even when dampened with exercise-induced sweat, they also itched like a bad case of poison ivy.
As long as itching is the topic, you might also want to remember that, just as today, spring dog training or early fall hunts were often a survival test as the insect hordes, determined to suck every drop of blood out of you and your dogs, made the WWII blitzkriegs look tame and relatively harmless by comparison. But the difference is that now we have safe and effective repellents for both ourselves and our dogs. Back in the “good old days,” we had something called “6-12″ which was very greasy, minimally effective, definitely had a distinctive odor and was not for use on animals. (I often wondered why it was considered to be safe to use on humans but bad for animals and there was no answer to that question until 1991 when it was taken off the market after research showed it caused developmental defects in animals which might account for some of the goofy hunters and dog trainers I encountered over the years.) Who would want to return to the days of delicate glass-lined thermos bottles that you always dropped on freezing days when you would have traded your best shotgun, or possibly even your first-born child, for a cup of hot coffee that wasn’t heavily laced with broken glass. As for the firearms we use, others may long for the days when semi-automatic shotguns ejected their spent shells by means of recoil only but give me a gas-operated auto any day. I blame the arthritic pains in my shoulder on the abuse it took from a Browning A-5 and when the company brought out its first gas auto loader, I was practically first in line and more than happy to make the switch.
Duck hunting in the good old days meant standing or kneeling in freezing water in uninsulated hip boots or waders or sitting in an aluminum boat which somehow amplified the chill from the water into those same uninsulated boots. Goose hunting meant a couple of hours of backbreaking work digging pits in the dark and then trying to ward off tremors that would register on the Richter Scale as you sat in that frigid pit on frozen ground for several hours. Now duck hunters sit in comfort in fiberglass boats on swiveling, padded seats. As for my goose hunting, it’s now done out of a haybale blind that breaks the wind, has a carpeted floor, a shelf for extra shells or a thermos, and a small gas heater that keeps things toastie in even the most brutal weather the Canadian prairies can throw at me. Did I also mention that, like the duck hunters, I sit on a nicely padded swivel chair with a back rest? Only a fool or someone who revels in pain and misery would want to go back to the good old days of waterfowl hunting.
Comfort for the dogs also has improved. Instead of only their coats for protection against icy water, they have the same sort of neoprene vests as U.S. Navy SEALs and Scuba divers have in their wetsuits which also helps keep them warm in the boat or the blind between retrieves and my dogs don’t object one bit to napping on the carpeting in my haybale blind when the goose action gets slow.
It may just be me and my circle of friends and hunting partners but most of the stories about the good old days eventually center around the dogs of our earlier years and for some reason, those old-time dogs, at least in the stories their human hunting partners tell, were better than the ones we’re hunting with today. I blame that on two things: one is that my friends and hunting partners have had just enough bourbon or scotch or brandy to make their wanderings down memory lane focus on only the positive and if it’s necessary to make a better story, they’ve added some embellishment. The second is that they’re talking about their first or second dog and it is natural to remember these animals as probably better than they actually were. Also, I contend that our expectations were much lower in our early days as hunters. If the dog pointed a couple of birds, flushed game in range and retrieved more or less, it was a great day. I recall being ecstatic because my first retriever would actually swim out, pick up a duck and bring it close enough to shore so I could reach it. All my hunting friends were equally impressed. Of course, it took an entire pocket full of rocks thrown in the direction of the downed duck to get the dog into its vicinity so she could pick it up but no matter, she “retrieved.” Nowadays, if one of my retrievers gave me that sort of sloppy performance, I’d either be hanging my head in shame if I was responsible for the dog’s training or roundly cursing the wasted expenditure of my discretionary income if the dog was trained by a pro.
The advances made in dog training in the past 20 years have been enormous. Let’s be candid. Many of the methods used to train dogs 20 to 30 years ago were pretty brutal. They could be summed up in one word–force–as in “By God you will obey my commands or you’ll regret it, that is, if you live.” Unfortunately, some of that attitude is still around but for the most part, trainers have recognized that the old adage “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” applies to canine as well as human nature. Gentle persuasion works better in most dog training situations than does pure force.
In the old days, for example, you could put flaming splinters under dog trainers’ fingernails and still never get them to utter the phrase “Good boy/girl.” And, the way a dog was rewarded for doing something correctly was that they didn’t get the living bejesus beaten out of them, or fried to within an inch of their lives by a heavy finger on the transmitter button of an electronic collar, or peppered with birdshot. Thankfully, most of that sort of training abuse has gone by the wayside and the result is more willing and cooperative hunting dogs. That’s not to say that some force will never be necessary in training a dog, it’s just that it has become very much of a last resort in dealing with a truly hardheaded dog, for most trainers, rather than the first technique used to convince almost any dog to do something. Of course, as our skills as trainers improved and new techniques were proven to work, we have also become more fussy about the dog’s performance and we’re not as easily satisfied as we were in the good old days.
I would also argue that the dogs are better than they were in those times. For one thing, they are more biddable. For many breeds, through the actions of careful and responsible breeders, much of the hardheadedness has been bred out of many sporting breeds and with their inclusion in the hunt test program, some terrier breeds as well. In the case of some breeds, a lot of the surliness has also been eliminated. There has been a growing recognition among many breeders that it is important that their dogs both adhere to the conformation standard and remain capable of doing the jobs the breed was historically intended to do. For years, with many breeds, sporting breed people had to make a choice: you could either have a pretty dog that was a lousy hunter or you could have an ugly dog that would hunt. Again, thanks to the actions of some dedicated breeders, although some might call them foolhardy, even among breeds badly split between “show” and “field” types, if you are persistent, you can find a pup that has both the beauty which the breed standard calls for and the brains to do its historical work. What’s more, there is a much greater number of breeds to choose from when seeking your canine hunting partner than there was 20 years ago.
There is also much more genetic testing being done. Whereas twenty or thirty years ago, a responsible and dedicated breeder might have had the dog’s hips x-rayed and had them checked for progressive retinal atrophy (PRA), there are now a whole host of tests designed to detect a variety of genetic disorders and more being developed every year. The result is healthier dogs that are able to live out their breed’s normal lifespan and retain their ability to do the job the breed was intended to do well into their geriatric years. In the past, I was looking at retirement for my retrievers when they got to be about nine. My last two have hunted successfully and happily when they were 12. While the dogs of today may not be magnitudes better than those of times gone by, they are better in a lot of ways.
So, while the temptation is to see the good old days as a glass overflowing, that view does a real disservice to reality. But, I’ll be the first to admit that it is tough to compete with something as perfect as selective memory when the ducks and geese always decoyed, the upland birds flushed harder and flew faster, the bunnies and rabbits ran like their tails were on fire, and all the dogs were bird/game-finding machines.
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Posted by ralbee
on Nov 20 2015. Filed under Current Articles, Editorial, Featured.
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