Take puppy steps when schooling dog

Hockey is a sport of hard knocks, but you don’t teach the game to players by beating them over the head with a stick.

The same goes for training hunting dogs, according to Pat Hanlon, 44, a former hockey coach turned professional retriever trainer.

Hanlon attributes much of his dog handling success to the team-building approach he polished as a coach, plus the education he got from a black Lab named Duffy.

“He was my first dog,” Hanlon said. “I was just an amateur hacking around, and, I’ll put it this way, he was a great set of training wheels.”

Duffy, who’s buried overlooking Hanlon’s Armagh Retrievers kennel near Cheney, fetched Hanlon notoriety by becoming one of fewer than 50 retrievers inducted into the American Kennel Club hunt test master hall of fame.

“He put up with a lot of my mistakes and he still excelled,” Hanlon said. “He weighed 90 pounds, and heart was 89 pounds of it.”

Most hunters will never own a dog with Duffy’s superior aptitude for learning the game of shoot and retrieve. Even Hanlon says he often wishes he had another dog like that to apply what he’s learned in 10 years as a pro trainer.

But the training progression is the same, whether you have a dog of championship potential or simply an eager tail-wagging hunting companion, he said.

Hanlon and the Spokane Bird Dog Association plan to explain the steps to getting the most out of a retriever in a full-day clinic for people with dogs of all ages and abilities on Aug. 20 near Cheney.

“The secret to dog training is problem solving,” he said. “You can look at all the videos, books and articles on training a retriever and learn the basic techniques. But what do you do when the dog doesn’t react the way the book says he should?”

Every dog is different and no dog will respond exactly the same way every day, he said.

“I’ll be trying to teach people how to tweak their methods to get out of a pickle,” he said, noting that it’s usually counterproductive to attempt ramming a dog through a crux in training.

Among his first basic points to remember:

•Take little steps.

•A dog should be corrected only when it’s been properly progressed to know that it has done something wrong.

•Be patient.

Some of the dogs coming to the Aug. 20 clinic might be ready for refinement in the swim-by, a test of a retriever’s skill at taking signals while in the water and exiting the pond as commanded rather than directly to the handler.

But before working on those advanced water skills, a dog must be methodically progressed.

“We start working a retriever with a flat collar on a rope and throwing bumpers at 10 feet on land, gradually increasing the distance and their confidence before we ever go to the water,” he said.

“The dog has to know all the commands and be able to do everything on land first. You don’t move on to the next step when the dog does something right once or twice. We’re all in a hurry, but you have to make sure they know what they’re supposed to do.

“The dog needs to learn how to be a team player, and so does the handler.”

When the dog is ready for water, Hanlon initially uses short retrieves with the dog starting at the shoreline. Progressing to the skill of retrieving a bird or bumper that falls on land across the water, Hanlon uses a pond that’s much wider to the right and left than it is across.

“Once again, you start the dog from the water’s edge so it doesn’t even think about running around the pond rather than swimming straight across,” he said.

Patience can’t be overemphasized.

“It’s far better to coax a dog rather than trying to pound something into it,” he said. “You can dig a hole and set yourself back.”

Other Hanlon tips to consider:

•Hockey players get uptight when a coach applies too much pressure, and so do dogs.

•Timing is the key to correction.

•Keep expectations reasonable.

Training a raw dog to hunting competency – a steady dog that will take basic hand signals and possibly retrieve doubles – takes about four months of training 5-6 days a week.

“Keep the sessions short and be consistent,” Hanlon said.

And when hunting season comes around, don’t flush all your training down the drain. “Leave your gun at home the first couple of times out and let your buddy do the shooting so you can handle the dog,” he added.

In other words, be willing to make a sacrifice for the team.