DogTrainingAggression.com

One cold winter morning, two bird hunters were in a duck blind. They each had a dog with them. The first bird hunter bragged and bragged about his dog, and when he killed a duck, the dog jumped into the frigid water, quickly retrieved the duck, and returned to the blind in record time. The second duck hunter said, “Yeah — pretty good dog, but mine’s better.” The second bird hunter killed a duck, and his dog ran right across the top of the water never even getting his feet wet, retrieved the duck, and returned to the blind in record time.

There was a long silence, and finally the second bird hunter said to the first bird hunter, “So what do you think about MY dog.” The first bird hunter thought a minute, and then he said, “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything about it…but your dog can’t swim, can he?” That has nothing at all to do with training a dog to hunt birds, but I think it’s funny.

Dogs that are trained to hunt birds, of course, need basic obedience training. They need to learn to come, sit, stay, and lie down just like every other well-behaved dog. But beyond the usual obedience training, bird dogs need to learn and obey three additional commands.

The first, and most important, of these commands is “whoa.” The command means that the dog is to stop right where he is and stay there until his owner gets to him or gives him another command. This is the hardest of all the bird hunting commands that a dog has to learn. Some say that once the “whoa” command has been mastered, the major part of training is complete. The other two commands that a bird dog must learn are “come” and “heel,” which he has already probably learned in his basic obedience training.