by JerinWI

Created on: August 17, 2009

Many people in the dog world have "the only" answer to how a dog should be properly trained. I have been associated with different dog trainers from around the USA over the past five years. I train and tournament hunt with bird dogs. English Setters are my breed of choice, but my methods of training have worked on all sorts of breeds. Each dog has a different tolerance for the level of work that can be done with them at one time. I use the word tolerance because I don't want to say personality. The biggest misconception people have when training their own animals is that they have a "personality". The problem with saying that is that it puts the dog in the "people" category.

Dogs are not people. They are animals that people have domesticated throughout history to do certain jobs for them. They became like companions afterwards. There for it only makes sense to me to go back to the "wolf pack" and start our training there.

Just because I say I train bird dogs, doesn't mean I "only" train to bird hunt. I can use the same training methods on a collie, or pit bull for that matter, and if you think I couldn't train a German Shepherd how to point a bird, I would take that bet. It all flows together for me. I just throw in a few other steps with my initial obedience training to prep the dog for later bird work.

The first big step for me is choosing a pup from the litter that will be assertive. Not passive, or aggressive. An assertive temperament sets you up from the start with a dog that you can work with. I can't take credit for everything I train, as I have learned through reading many books and watching films, and to be honest wrecking a couple dogs along the way through trial and error. (When I say wreck, I mean make them gun shy, so at that point they are turned to house pets vs. bird dogs)

When I look at a litter of pups, I don't go looking at the pups themselves at first. Puppies are all cute and adorable. "They will in fact turn into their parents some day." If I decide I like a litter based on the parents, I then look at the litter. I don't go in looking for a certain color or size right away, and sometimes not even male or female. If I am looking for a male, I will ask the owner of the litter to have them separated before I get there. The next step is to look at them as a group. As the pups are up and moving around together (around 5 weeks old or so) I will take my wad of keys and drop them on the ground. This creates a stir. Some pups run up and

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