Illustration by John Cuneo

I have three badly behaved children and a damn good bird dog. My Brittany spaniel, Millie (age seven), is far more biddable and obedient than my daughters, Muffin (eleven) and Poppet (nine), and has a better nose than my son, Buster (five). Buster does smell, but in his case it’s an intransitive verb.

My dog is perdition to the woodcock and ruffled grouse we hunt hereabouts and death itself to the pen-raised Huns, chukars, and quail she encounters at the local shooting club. Millie hunts close, quarters well, points beautifully, is staunch to wing and shot, and retrieves with verve. My children…are doing okay in school, I guess. They look very sweet—when they’re asleep.

As my family was growing, I got a lot of excellent advice about discipline, responsibility, respect, affection, and cultivation of the work ethic. Unfortunately this advice was from dog trainers and was directed to my dog. In the matter of child rearing there was also plenty of advice, all of it contradictory—from family and family-in-law, wife, wife’s girlfriends, pediatricians, nursery school teachers, babysitters, neighbors and random old ladies on the street, plus Dr. Spock, Dr. Phil, and, for all I know, Dr Pepper: Spank them/Don’t spank them. Make them clean their plate/Keep them from overeating. Potty train them at one/Send them to Potty Training Camp at fourteen. Hover over their every activity/Get out of their faces. Don’t drink or smoke during pregnancy/Junior colleges need students too. And none of this advice works when you’re trying to get the kids to quit playing video games and go to bed.

It took me years to realize that I should stop asking myself what I’m doing wrong as a parent and start asking myself what I’m doing right as a dog handler.

The first right thing I do is read and reread Gun Dog by the late Richard A. Wolters. This is the book that revolutionized dog training in 1961. (Of course, the dogs are now forty-nine years old and not much use, but the book is still great.)

“Start ’em young” is the message from Wolters. And that’s why, if we have another child, he’s going to learn to walk pushing on the handle of a Toro in the yard instead of teetering along the edge of the sofa cushions in the living room. Wolters, along with a number of other bird shooters, had realized that waiting until the traditional one-year mark before teaching a puppy to hunt was like carrying your kid in a Snugli until he was seven. Wolters was sure he was right about this, but he wasn’t sure why. Then he came across the work of Dr. John Paul Scott, a founder of the Animal Behavior Society. Dr. Scott was involved in a project to help Guide Dogs for the Blind, Inc. Seeing Eye dog training was considered almost too difficult to be worthwhile. Using litters from even the best bloodlines, the success rate for guide-dog training was only 20 percent. Dr. Scott discovered that if training began at five weeks instead of a year, and continued uninterrupted, the success rate rose to 90 percent.