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Part
4 -
15th Feb
(You can read
Part 1 here)
Gundog Club founder and author Pippa
Mattinson takes a long look at the 'lot' of the
working Springer Spaniel in modern society
We have been
looking at the problems that many people experience
when they take on their first working Springer
Spaniel, not only in purely pet homes, but also
homes where there is every intention to train the
spaniel for fieldwork. We have also been looking at
how traditional advice together with modern
attitudes and preferences towards dog training
methods are contributing to problems people are
experiencing with these uniquely intense little
hunting dogs. The sad truth is that rescue centres
are kept very busy caring for and re-homing Springer
Spaniels, many of them clearly from working lines.
One thing is
certain. These dogs are not in rescue centres
because their heelwork has been overdone, or
because their hunting isn’t up to standard. Some
are there because they are a victim of circumstance,
families breaking up due to divorce, or perhaps the
death of an owner. But many are there because their
owners cannot cope with them. They are there
because they are ‘out of control’.
In this section, we
take a look at what those owning, or thinking of
owning, a working bred Springer Spaniel, can do to
avoid getting themselves into difficulties with
their young dog.
If
you are thinking of buying a puppy
How can you tell if a Springer is really the right
dog for you? It is important to be well
informed and objective about the nature and
attributes of the working Springer Spaniel.
Please read this article through from beginning to
end, I know it is a marathon, but by
then end, you will be able to ask yourself some
questions and to answer them truthfully.
If you answer yes to either of these two questions,
for example a Springer might not be
the right dog for you.
A young Springer may need you to focus totally on
him, for much of the first year at all times when he
is running free out of doors. Failure to do this
can be disastrous. It is very difficult for anyone
to sustain this kind of concentration for periods of
an hour or more, and interesting walks often last
this long. It is worth noting that experienced
Spaniel trainers run their young dogs for short
periods of time, no more than 20 minutes or so.
This is not just to keep up the dog’s speed and
prevent him from dawdling (though it serves this
purpose too) it is also to stop the handler’s brain
from melting! It is also worth
considering that it is very difficult to focus 100%
on a dog whilst you have people with you. They will
inevitably expect a share of your attention.
These things are very important as they are such a
major part of many people’s expectations when they
are choosing their first dog.
There are some more, equally important questions
you should ask
-
Do you really
want a dog whose primary instinct is to
find, flush (and even catch) live animals?
-
Are you willing
to focus on your dog 100% of the time you are
outdoors for the next year or so?
-
Are you willing
to work hard on training your dog, and to learn
fast?
-
Are you
interested in the Springer’s role as a gundog,
and in what gundog training can do for your
Springer?
-
Are you willing
and able to get help if and when you need it
whilst training your Springer?
If you can honestly answer yes to these five
questions, then a Springer may be the dog for you.
It is worth remembering that although the act of
chasing is not the working Springer’s
function, it is his natural instinct. The working
dog that stops to every flush and turns to hunt away
on command has had many, many hours of hard work and
attention put into him. Unfortunately, with a
hard-hunting dog, there is no ‘half way house’.
Your dog is either under control, or it isn’t. And
getting that control takes a lot of effort.
You need to be prepared for that.
If you are committed to
training entirely without aversives you may
find a Springer more challenging than some other
breeds. You will need to be ruthless about
controlling his environment and making sure you
never expose him to any 'accidental rewards' that
you cannot compete with.
Whatever your chosen methods, if you still think a
Springer is for you, then it will help you greatly
if you work hard at increasing your chances of
finding the right puppy. Not all working Springers
have the very ‘intense’ hunting drive we have
described here. Some are more ‘laid back’ and
trainable, and are far more suitable for many
owners. Don’t worry too much about buying acres of
red ink on a pedigree. What works best for a field
trial kennels won’t necessarily work best in your
world. If you know of a nice Springer, whose
behaviour you admire, find out where it came from.
Buying a brother or sister from the same parents,
even if they are from a different litter, gives you
the best chance of a similar puppy as siblings share
a lot of genes. Don’t be too influenced by the
behaviour of dogs that have been trained by experts.
You need a dog that can be trained by you.
Never, ever buy a puppy without meeting its mother,
and wherever possible meet its father too. Make
sure that they and any other related adult dogs in
the kennels, are the sort of dogs you would want
to live with. Steer clear of dogs that seem
disinterested in people. A well-trained good
tempered gundog won’t leap all over you (unless
perhaps it’s a cocker!) but it will be pleased to
see you and happy for you to stroke it, tail wagging
furiously. Beware the puppy whose mother regards
you with suspicion, or with a stiffened body
posture, and rigid tail. If the puppies are
very young, it could be that she is overprotective
because her pups are close, if so, ask to see her
and interact with her well away from her puppies,
but err on the side of caution. 'Run away'
fast if there is any sign of aggression or
nervousness in the other dogs in the kennels. You
are looking for a friendly dog. One that loves
people, and actively seeks out their company.
Ask the breeder some searching questions. What are
the best points of the stud dog. You are looking for
'biddable', 'trainable', 'calm' etc not necessarily
a list of competitive awards, speed, or style.
Speed won't help you when are sat in the car park
waiting for the dog to come back. Some
trainers will refer to an 'honest' dog. This
is a good thing as it refers to a dog that works
with the handler, rather than for himself.
Enquire as to what kind of problems the breeder
encountered whilst training the pup's mother (every
dog has some problems) What kind of
characteristics are they breeding for? Careful
selection will improve your chances of getting a
puppy that will respond well to you and want to work
with you. But remember that buying a puppy is
always something of a gamble. Taking an
experienced person with you will help you choose a
healthy puppy and possibly one with potential, but
be aware that the experienced trainer is not
necessarily looking for the same attributes that you
are. Unless he is going to be on the end of
the phone every time you get into trouble, you need
to rely to a great extent on your own
judgement.
No matter how hard you try, there are no
guarantees. No matter how carefully you choose, you
could still end up with a very ‘hot-headed’ dog.
You need therefore to be aware of all the ways in
which you can influence the outcome of your training
by managing your puppy effectively from the very
first day
Read up on
rearing a gundog puppy. Arm yourself with
every scrap of information you can lay your hands on
and be very wary of any advice to let your puppy
‘have its head’ for the first six months unless
you have a very experienced ‘mentor’ and are
prepared to use some seriously firm methods later
on.
What
can I do before my puppy is five months old?
Forget about 'walking the dog'. For a definition of
what I mean by 'walking' see below. Your
puppy does not need walking. What he needs is to
believe without question that you are the centre of
his universe. Treat every outing with your puppy
seriously. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it,
simply that you give him your full and undivided
attention. Think constantly about encouraging your
puppy to ‘change direction’ Encourage
your puppy to explore, but to do it close to you.
This means never walking in a
straight line with a spaniel puppy but rather take a
few steps one way, then a few steps another. Keep
this up all the time and watch him follow your lead,
learning to zig-zag and quarter his ground. This
comes easily and naturally to a working bred
spaniel. Especially when started young. Be
unpredictable. He should be learning to take
responsibility for finding and following you,
not the other way around. Whether or not your
spaniel is intended to be a pet or a working dog,
this is the best way to teach him to take his
exercise in close proximity to you, without
spoiling his pleasure in constantly moving and
hunting.
Teach your puppy to walk to heel. You can
start this as early as you like. It will not
prevent a normal working Springer from hunting later
on, provided you keep heelwork lessons short
and age appropriate, and give your dog plenty of
opportunity to use his nose at other times.
Keep your spaniel puppy away from game
and other wildlife. This is crucial. It
includes rabbits, pheasants, squirrels etc. This
may mean being very picky about where you exercise
your puppy. Of course if your Springer is
intended for work, you do not want to keep him
away from the scent of game,
just from any chance of actually chasing it.
Ground with plenty of scent (not during heelwork) is
great as it encourages your pup to get his nose down
and follow it. But it is really important if
you are training where there is plenty of rabbit
activity for example, that you clear the
ground of rabbits before taking your pup into it.
This may mean leaving him in a vehicle, or getting a
friend to hold him, whilst you have a good
stomp about your chosen training area. If you are not
able or prepared to do this then you should be prepared for
trouble!
Retraining a dog with an established chasing problem
is a difficult and drawn out process. It may
involve considerable force, and the owner of the dog
will almost certainly need professional help.
Success cannot always be guaranteed
Oh
dear, I am already in trouble. Is it too late?
No. It is rarely too late. But you may be in for
some hard work, and some lifestyle changes. Perhaps
the first thing you should do, is to stop blaming
yourself. It probably isn’t your fault.
In some respects the way we expect new gundog owners
to cope is both unique and unreasonable. If we draw
parallels with another popular form of animal
training and look at the horse world, it may help
you to see just how much has been expected of you.
None of us could imagine a situation where someone
that has never ridden a horse before would be
encouraged to buy a thoroughbred racehorse, and not
only learn to ride it, but break it in and train it
as well. In fact, this would be quite ridiculous.
Yet we expect people with no experience whatsoever,
to take home a young gundog puppy, often highly
bred with Field Trials in mind, and not only learn
to handle, but also to train it, for the most part
with nothing more substantial to help them than a
book.
Granted, if your spaniel falls on you, you are
unlikely to die, but physical danger apart, the
knowledge and skills involved is comparable. So
don’t be too hard on yourself if you feel out of
your depth with your rapidly maturing working-bred
spaniel.
For the owner that wants to work his dog in the
shooting field, his solution is relatively
straightforward. He must eliminate the problem
behaviour (usually chasing) and replace it with an
alternative (the stop). The reward for the dog that
‘stops’ is more hunting (in another direction) or a
retrieve. Failure to stop, is not an option.
Installing the stop whistle in a dog that has been
chasing will almost always require expert help. It
is also likely to require some force. The owner
that wants to work the dog may well be sufficiently
motivated to do what is necessary. Stop walking his
dog, and start training him.
For the pet dog owner, it is often a very difficult
dilemma, because his expectations of the dog are so
far removed from dog’s natural capabilities. Family
walks as we have seen are often the principle
expectation of the pet dog owner. Yet the problem
Springer becomes more of a problem every time he is
walked. This is not his fault, and not really his
owner’s fault either. The problem for the spaniel
that is being kept as a pet, is that the owner knows
what he does not want the dog to do (he does
not want him to chase birds, or to go out of
sight) but has no idea what he wants the dog to do
instead. Whereas the working gundog knows
exactly what he must do in any given situation. If
he smells a pheasant he must push him
out of the bush. But when he sees the pheasant
leave the ground he must sit.
Simple!
Our gundogs have great natural instincts, together
with an advanced ability to learn very specific
skills such as “when I hear this whistle I must
stop” No problem. This makes them great team
players. But to ask a dog to understand that he
should not go ‘too far’ or ‘only chase a little
way’ is too complex and abstract a concept. He
needs clean cut boundaries.
“When X happens you must do Y, right
here, right now”. This is what he understands.
The best way for any spaniel owner, even if the dog
is intended as a pet, to avoid and eventually cure
‘chasing’ and ‘bolting’ episodes is to stop
‘walking’ the dog and start ‘training’ it
- gundog style. The solution for the pet dog
owner is therefore the same as for the working dog
owner but the pet dog owner may need more help and
support to acquire the motivation to carry the
training through. And to let go of that daily
walk. Perhaps we should make it clear at this
point what we mean by a walk.
The
definition of a ‘walk’
A family walk, even if you walk alone, has some
defining characteristics when it comes to managing
your dog. These characteristics include the
objective of the walk, the way in which it is
carried out and the lack of attention to
distractions.
The objective of the ‘walk’ is normally
relaxation/recreation and exercise. Sadly, these
objectives do not offer the best benefit to the
untrained spaniel. There are other ways to give him
exercise, and your relaxation and recreation are not
exactly compatible with intense concentration on
your dog. It is your full attention and
concentration that a Springer Spaniel really needs
you to give him outdoors, for at least the first
year of his life.
The style in which a walk is carried out is always
linear. That is to say, whilst you may be walking
in a large circle, to all intents and purposes,
from the dog’s point of view, you are travelling
forwards, all the time in a linear fashion. This
is disadvantageous to any gundog because it
encourages the dog to travel away from you over
increasing distances, and more importantly makes you
utterly predictable. It is particularly
disadvantageous to a spaniel, with his powerful
hunting instincts. He now knows exactly where to
find you at any given time. There you will be,
plodding along in the same old direction. This
gives him the security to use you as a base from
which to explore further and further away.
Finally, and most importantly, the family walk
typically pays no attention to the presence of
wildlife. To expect a young Springer to resist the
temptation to chase any living thing he comes across
on a walk is an extremely risky strategy as we have
seen, yet many new Spaniel owners fall into this
trap.
I
don’t want to stop walking the dog!
The ‘Stop walking the dog’ part seems to be a major
sticking point for so many people with difficult
Springers. Frequently, their daily walk is a fairly
miserable experience, stressful and pointless, spent
in dreaded anticipation of the first ‘chase’
followed by maybe hours of calling and searching,
fearing the worst, a phone call to say that their
dog has been found dead on the road, or worse that
he has caused a fatal accident. People tell us that
they spend hours sitting in the car park waiting for
the dog to decide to turn up when he is ready to be
chauffeured home. Yet the next day, or a week
later, they put themselves through all this again.
They come up with the most feeble excuses for
allowing their dog to get into a situation where it
can take off like a half crazed lunatic, crossing
roads or railway lines with total disregard. And
when given the simple information that they can
stop walking the dog now, people fight this
truth with unbelievable vigour.
Part of the reason for this is that it seems to be
ingrained into the public psyche that dogs must be
walked every day. People seem to believe that
terrible and dire things will happen to their dog if
he does not have his daily walk. I have known
people who are seriously ill, take their dog out
for a walk when they should be in bed, or even in
hospital, simply because they fear the consequences
if the walk is missed. Of course, we must provide
our dogs with adequate exercise, and if you do not
have any access to a fair sized garden or nearby
park for exercise purposes, then a regular
walk is important for his long term health.
But just like people, it is the overall level of
exercise that counts, not the level of exercise on
any given day, or the exact manner in which it is
taken. Racing around your garden for twenty minutes
is just as good for his cardiovascular system and
his muscles as dragging you along the pavement, or
chasing a deer through the forest for the same
amount of time. Not to mention safer and less
traumatic. And twenty minutes, two or three times a
day, is just as beneficial for a young dog’s body,
as a solid hour all in one go, and far better for
his mind. His concentration span being fairly
short.
Another reason for obsessive walking seems to be a
hope that if the dog is sufficiently tired, he will
somehow become better behaved. People tend to see
excessive ‘exercise’ as a cure for all sorts of
behavioural problems which it rarely is.
Unfortunately the hard facts are that the further
you walk the dog every day, the fitter he will
become, without any limit that you are capable of
matching. If your dog runs away when you take him
for a walk, all that walks will produce is a fitter
and more determined absconder. Once really fit,
most dogs could travel thirty or forty miles in a
day without any trouble. So no matter how far you
walk him every day, unless you are a fanatical
marathon runner, you will quickly get to the point
where your dog is no longer tired by your
endeavours. What are you going to do then?
Perhaps the main reason for a refusal to stop
walking the dog, is that it can be tough to accept
that something you have put a lot of effort into,
was actually not helping at all. In truth,
some of the worst behaved dogs are the most
exercised. Dogs do not need to be
allowed to race from one county to another each
morning in order to remain fit, happy and healthy.
And all those times you dragged yourself out in the
rain, or sat in the carpark waiting for his return,
you could have been tucked up in bed with a good
book, or better still, out gundog training.
Of course some of you thoroughly enjoy walking the
dog, but if this is the case, you are unlikely to
be having serious difficulties managing him. The
truth is, for many struggling dog owners, the day
they decide to stop walking the dog and start
training is the day they turn their dog’s life
around.
But
what about exercise?
As far as your dog’s exercise needs are concerned,
access to a reasonably sized exercise area (such as
a garden) where he can tear around several times a
day without getting into trouble, combined with a
good programme of gundog training designed for a
spaniel will provide him with plenty of exercise.
By ‘training’ rather than ‘walking’ you will still
be going out into the countryside, but now your
trips outdoors will be planned with your dog’s needs
in mind.
Your dog’s ‘training’ needs vary as he grows and
will at first involve short outings to selected bits
of countryside, where initially you will teach him
to explore and to retrieve, and build his
confidence, always in close proximity to you. You
can make these trips every day if you want to.
Later on he will need increasing access to
countryside in which to advance his training, but by
that time you will have a clearer idea of what is
involved.
The sooner you get on with the job and get started
with training, the sooner your spaniel can be taken
out in the shooting field for a whole lifetime of
sustained enjoyable exercise and fulfilling work,
for both of you, man (or woman) and dog together. Gundog
Training transforms people’s lives.
What are you waiting for?
But
doesn't gundog training just encourage dogs to hunt
other animals?
The role of a spaniel is to 'flush' game so that it
can be shot. However gundog training not only
instils a high level of obedience in every
participating dog, it specifically teaches the
spaniel to hunt in a controlled manner, close
to his handler, and to sit or
stop whenever game is flushed from cover.
This eliminates the 'chasing' element from his
natural repertoire of behaviours.
Gundog work is founded on solid obedience
and will improve the behaviour of any dog taking
part.
So
how do I set about gundog training. Shall I just
book on a course?
If your dog has a major recall problem, (ie you
can’t catch him once he is off the lead, or he will
not come back until he is ready) you will not be
able to take part in a gundog training course. At
least not yet. This is because your dog would
disrupt the training group and spoil it for everyone
else. Your first priority is to sort out the recall
problem. And for that your best bet is some
professional one-to-one help from an
experienced trainer.
However, if your dog recalls well except
in the presence of wildlife (rabbits, squirrels
etc) then you may well be able to join in a
gundog training course, where you will be
able to train away from such distractions and to
take advantage of the facilities provided by your
trainer. The Gundog Club runs courses across the
UK.
Our Grade One courses are suitable for
complete beginners and pet dogs are very welcome.
The responsibility for the welfare of the working
spaniel lies ultimately in the hands of those that
know them best.
In the
final instalment of this series we will be looking
at what the working gundog community can do,
to help improve the lot of these enchanting little
dogs, and to ensure that they get the life that they
deserve
NEXT INSTALMENT
- WHAT THE GUNDOG COMMUNITY CAN DO!
Update
to this article - October 2010
The
Gundog Club directors have decided to donate the
Graded Training Scheme to a brand new charity
dedicated to the welfare of working gundogs.
Training is a particularly vital welfare issue for
our hunting breeds. Correct training started
at an early age avoids so many of the problems that
lead to abandonment of working springers
Please
help us to launch this new charity by making a small
donation to
The Gundog Trust.
You can
read all about it by clicking on the link above.
Having
problems with a Springer? Get help now
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