A Sea Change In Gun Dog Training Techniques
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by Chris Robinson
Webster defines a sea change as “a marked change or transformation.” While William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase in The Tempest, used it in a song sung by Ariel, a supernatural spirit, to Ferdinand, Prince of Naples following Ferdinand’s father’s apparent death by drowning to literally mean a change brought about by the sea. Subsequent usage has referred to situations where a truly momentous change has taken place.
Thus, it is appropriate to call the change in gun dog training techniques that is occurring in some quarters a sea change. For, instead of adhering to the long history of dominance-based and compulsion training for sporting dogs, a small but growing number of trainers are switching to positive training techniques.
To demonstrate what a dramatic change this represents, it’s necessary to provide some historical perspective. In about 1949, James Lamb Free wrote a book titled Training Your Retriever. This essentially became the “bible” of retriever training and many of the techniques he advocated migrated into all gun dog training. One chapter in the book is titled Spare the Rod. It outlined ways to discipline a disobedient dog and talked about cases where a very heavy strap was needed. He also suggested getting rid of a dog that couldn’t take a “walloping.” The outspoken Free advocated his training style with unequivocal statements such as “you don’t want anybody else to even speak a kind word to your dog–much less fondle and pet him” and “he’ll be much better off, at least for a year or so, if you keep him in a proper pen out in the yard and keep it locked with the key in your pocket”. God forbid that you should ever treat a hunting dog as a pet because that would ruin them for serious fieldwork. Only dogs kept in outdoor kennels and away from the influence of family members and the gracious living conditions in the house could be top quality hunters. Then along came the electronic collar which replaced the strap and walloping, to a significant degree, with a jolt of electricity. This was immediate adopted by trainers because it gave them the opportunity to administer a severe, immediate correction for any disobedience. This sort of heavy-handed, coercive training pretty much became the standard for training sporting dogs, particularly in the retriever world but also, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the gun dog training world as a whole.
I learned my gun dog training lessons from people who used these techniques and I’d be the first to admit that they work although I’ll qualify that by also saying that I’ve seen a LOT of potentially good dogs ruined by these coercive techniques, in particular the overuse and misuse of the e-collar. I often thought that if anyone from a humane society, to say nothing of some animal rights person like a PETA member, spent any time at all around sporting dog training grounds, at least half the trainers would be cited for animal abuse. What was probably even more disturbing was that a great many of these trainers, both professional and amateur, did not consider these techniques to be abusive because they had gradually been conditioned to accept the pain inflicted on their dogs as the price to be paid in order to be successful in the field trial game.
That these coercive, negative reinforcement methods produced dogs that represented the absolute highest levels of attainment in this country including national and national amateur field champions is beyond question. However, even though these techniques enabled me to train several dogs, both retrievers and pointing breeds, all the way through the master hunter level, I kept saying to myself and anyone else who would listen that there simply HAD to be a better way. And, I was not alone. The professional trainer who was my main mentor quit the field trial game after making 14 retriever field champions because, he said, he simply couldn’t bring himself to be that mean to dogs anymore. Around the gun dog world, there clearly were others who felt the same way so along about the year 2000, when professional trainer Robert Milner’s book Retriever Training: A Back-to-Basics Approach appeared, he had an audience eager to hear what he had to say on the subject of positive training.
I had already started incorporating and adapting some positive training ideas in working with my sporting dogs that I had learned from people in obedience classes and found that using gentler, less coercive methods with positive rewards still gave me dogs that came reliably on both a voice and whistle command, sat and went down without fuss and even were willing to walk at heel without being constantly forced to do so. The obedience folks also showed me how to teach the “fetch,” “hold” and “leave it” commands without resorting to an ear pinch, a toe hitch or worse, turning up the juice on the electronic collar. That alone was a major breakthrough for me because I’ve always disliked the force-fetch. Like my former mentor, I just didn’t like being that mean to my dogs.
Despite numerous derisive comments from my fellow sporting dog people, I became at least a semi-“cookie trainer” and one really big plus to this change was that my dogs seemed much happier doing whatever job I asked them to do. As I observed people in other dog sports–rally, agility–being successful with positive training techniques, the idea that gun dog training was a special area that had to depend primarily on negative reinforcement to get the job done just didn’t add up. So, when I trained my two females eight years ago, I had already incorporated some positive techniques in my training.
I had decided to try more and different positive techniques when the newest member of my pack arrived a bit more than a year ago but the real convincer was a pair of books that a friend who runs her dogs in retriever field trials had recommended. Written by a former U.S. Navy SEAL, the books outlined many of the techniques used by the SEALs to train their war dogs. Knowing how brutal SEAL training is for the human SEALs and since the books were touted by a retriever field trial person, I expected another course in harsh, coercive training but I was dead wrong. The SEALs’ dog training techniques are about 180 degrees different from the training the human SEALs receive particularly in the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL phase of their SEAL experience. Whereas the human SEALs in training spend a good deal of their time in pain and freezing, the dogs are taught the tasks they need to perform with gentle, positive reinforcements. Considering what SEAL dogs have to do, if positive techniques worked for their training, it just made sense that they also should work when training gun dogs whose jobs are far less stressful and certainly less dangerous than those performed by the SEALs’ dogs. So, I set out to train Bo, the new pup, as positively as I could.
What I discovered right away is that there is not exactly a plethora of books and DVDs available that provide specific information on how to train gun dogs using strictly positive reinforcement. I found myself, on several occasions, having to adapt methods that are used by obedience, rally and agility trainers to make them applicable to training Bo. I also have to admit, and this is likely to be heresy to a lot of people in other dog sports, that I’m not completely sold on the idea of clicker training and what’s more, probably because I’m not completely sold on the idea, it did not seem to be particularly effective with Bo. But treats and toys will motivate him to do just about anything.
In the first year of his training to be a hunting dog, it was definitely not always a smooth trip. For one thing, he has an extreme sensitivity to loud noises, a problem that will probably be a long-term issue, and for another, at least half the time or more, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Poor Bo was my “experimental dog” because I had to learn a totally new training method as we went along. There were many, many times when he gave me a “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” look and frequently the honest answer was “No.” Still, he kept persevering, hoping for the best. It’s tough to destroy a pup’s innate optimism which was a lucky thing for both of us. I also discovered that it takes quite a bit longer to get your point across using positive training and infinitely more patience. Fortunately, I was able to find a professional trainer, Craig Klein at Fisher’s Kennels and Hunt Club in central Minnesota, who has embraced many of the positive training techniques to help us through some of the really rough spots. At the end of his first year, I had a dog that while certainly not ready to successfully run master hunt tests, demonstrated enough pluses in his performance for optimism that with experience and maturity, he’ll be a fine hunting dog.
So, what will it take for positive training to become a widely accepted method in the gun dog world? Well, the greatest boost this training technique could have would be for the people who run their dogs in hunt tests, field trials or just hunt with them to see substantial proof that positive training can produce a great hunting companion. There are some dogs that were positively trained that have earned titles in the U.S. but they are not numerous. This is primarily because positive gun dog trainers in this country are vastly outnumbered by trainers using traditional, negative reinforcement training programs. For positive gun dog training to gain substantial ground in this country, there will have to be many, many more dogs with this type of training that earn hunt test titles and there will likely even have to be a few that earn an FC or an AFC. But, the fact is that gun dog training is changing. The change might be slow but it is definitely happening and for those of us who kept saying there had to be a better way, the change is not happening one minute too soon.
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Posted by ralbee
on Feb 19 2016. Filed under Current Articles, Editorial, Featured.
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