Run Your Dog Like It’s Not Your Dog

One of the things I remember most about my time in California working with Rex Carr was the number of dogs I ran every day. I would get every dog off the truck, probably twelve to fifteen dogs a day, and a lot of the time I knew very little about them.

I didn't have much history to fall back on. I didn't necessarily know what a dog had done the day before, what it was good at, where it struggled, or what somebody else thought it might do. I had the dog that was standing in front of me, and I had to figure things out pretty quickly.

I didn't realize it at the time, but all those dogs were teaching me something besides how to train retrievers. They were honing my skills of observation.

When you don't know a dog, you have to watch. Everything you're seeing in the moment becomes information. How the dog carries itself, where its eyes go, whether it is relaxed or tense, how it reacts to something changing in the field. My brain was taking all of that in and using it to make training decisions, whether I was conscious of the process or not.

I couldn't rely on what I thought I knew about the dog. I had to rely on what the dog was showing me.

I've thought about that experience quite a bit over the years, and I was reminded of it again recently after finishing a couple of workshops. One of the things I still enjoy most is seeing a dog for the first time.

I'm usually watching before the dog ever gets to the line. I'll watch it approach the holding blind. I'll watch what happens while it's waiting and then what happens when it steps out with the handler. I'm looking at the dog's eyes, its posture, its pace and where its attention goes. Is the dog interested? Nervous? Excited? Intense? Is it connected to the handler or already somewhere else mentally?

You can learn a tremendous amount in a very short period of time if you pay attention.

I enjoy trying to get that first read on a dog. Then, as a three- or four-day workshop goes along and I see more of that dog, I'll check myself. Was the impression I got on day one accurate? Did the things I noticed before that first setup turn out to mean what I thought they meant? Was there something I missed?

I'm still practicing.

In some ways, I think it's easier to do this with a dog I've never seen before because I don't have any assumptions about it. I don't know its reputation. I don't know what it did last weekend. I don't know that it "always" does something. All I have is what's happening in front of me.

That's where this gets interesting with our own dogs.

The better you know a dog, the more history you bring with you. That's a good thing. You should know your dog. But that history can also influence what you see.

Maybe your dog has crept on flyers before, so you're waiting for the creep. Maybe you've decided your dog gets nervous in a particular situation. Maybe it has struggled with a certain kind of water entry or tended to pop on difficult blinds. Before anything has even happened, you may already have an idea about what your dog is going to do and why it's going to do it.

Sometimes we're no longer watching the dog. We're watching for the dog we expect to see.

That's an important distinction.

If I'm watching an unfamiliar dog come out of a holding blind, I'm not thinking, "This dog always does this." I can't. I've never seen the dog before. So I'm paying attention to what is actually happening. The dog may slow down. Its posture may change. Its attention may leave the handler for a second. It may become more intense as it gets closer to the line. Its eyes may tell me something before the rest of the dog does.

Those little things can matter because the behavior we eventually call the "problem" often isn't the first thing that happened.

Take creeping. By the time the dog moves forward, that's obvious. Everybody sees the creep. But what happened before it? Was the dog's excitement building as it approached the line? Did its focus change when it saw the guns? Did you see tension building in its body? Did the connection between dog and handler start changing before the first bird was ever thrown?

That's the information I want.

The same is true with a dog that pops on a blind, refuses a cast, swings its head, loses focus or has trouble settling on the line. The behavior is important, but if we only start paying attention once the behavior occurs, we may have missed part of the story.

This goes back to something I wrote about recently in Read the Dog. I've become more convinced with every passing year that the motivation behind a behavior is often more important than the behavior itself. Two dogs can do exactly the same thing for completely different reasons. If you don't understand what's driving the behavior, it's very easy to choose the wrong solution.

The first step in understanding is learning to see what's actually there.

One of the best ways I know to get better at that is to watch dogs you don't know. The next time you're training with a group, don't only watch whether somebody else's dog gets the bird or carries the blind. Pick a dog you haven't seen much and really watch it.

Start before it gets to the line.

What do you notice walking toward the holding blind? What changes while the dog waits? What happens when it comes out? Where are its eyes? What does its body tell you? Does its level of intensity change? What do you think that dog is going to do?

Then watch the work and see whether your read was right.

You won't always be right. I'm not always right. That's part of the exercise. If your read turns out to be wrong, go back and think about what you saw and what you might have missed. That's how you get better at reading dog behavior.

Then try doing the same thing with your own dog.

The next time you come out of the holding blind, forget for a few seconds that you've trained this dog for years. Forget what happened yesterday. Forget what happened at the last hunt test, field trial or training session. Don't look for the behavior you expect to see.

Run your dog like it's not your dog.

Watch the dog that's standing beside you right now.

What are the eyes telling you? What is the body telling you? What changed between the holding blind and the line? What is happening before anything has actually gone wrong?

You know your dog better than anybody. Don't throw that knowledge away. Just don't let what you already know keep you from seeing something new.

After all these years, I still find that fascinating. The dogs are giving us information all the time. Our job is to keep getting better at seeing it.

Stay curious, 

Pat Burns