By David DiBenedetto | Dec 09/Jan 10 | 

Training Days

Want a hard-core gun dog? Check with your wife first

Illustrations by Jame Noel Smith

The last dog I owned was a yellow Labrador named Salty. He retrieved one duck in his gun-dog career. His claim to fame was that after being neutered, he would frequently run away. Where? To the vet’s office, a good two miles away. Why? Well, we liked to say he was looking for his balls.

This time around I chose a Boykin spaniel. Or, more correctly, my bride of five months, Jenny, chose a Boykin spaniel. I had never heard of the breed, but Jenny had done her research. The Boykin is the state dog of South Carolina, which was fitting since we had recently moved to Charleston. They love the water and are great around families, and their diminutive stature (the largest ones top out near forty pounds) makes them a good choice for small homes and boats. Best of all, they are bred to be hunting dogs.

But I still caught hell from my circle of hunting buddies. A fellow outdoor writer told me I had gotten “a chick dog,” and my own brother told me my pup just wouldn’t have the same fire as a Lab.

We named her Pritchard (Pritch for short), after an undeveloped barrier island off the coast. Before she arrived, we had her crate ready, along with an array of toys (including a small beaver without stuffing that we called Roadkill) and a number of bones and rawhides.

We made two trips to the breeder’s home before we chose Pritch. We narrowed our choice down to three medium-size females and set them loose, each with a different-colored collar, in the front yard. I tossed puppy-training bumpers to see which dog had the best drive and studied their conformation for indications of character. Then I noticed Jenny holding the blue-collared pup while the other two vied for her attention. Our decision had been made.

When we drove Pritch home, she was a brown ball of fur not more than six pounds. Jenny sat in the backseat because it was safer, and I held the wheel with two hands the entire way. Pritch whimpered herself to sleep after fifteen minutes, and my wife just sat there marveling at our little dog.

Within two days we discovered Pritch had a stomach bug, making the slightest cry reason enough to run to the door with her, hoping to get there in time. We moved her crate from our upstairs bedroom to the living room and inflated the air mattress. There we all slept, “like a pack of wolves,” Jenny liked to say. One night I heard Pritch scratch at the crate and, before I could get to her, she let loose. Jenny popped up from the bed.

“What was that?” she asked, as if a limb had fallen on the roof.

“That was your dog,” I said, “having an accident.”

We quickly came up with more words for dog poop than Eskimo have for snow. Pencil. Soft Serve. Log. Mud. Before long Jenny and I starting calling our pup Birth Control because there was no time or energy left for nookie. But with a dollop of yogurt and a powdering of probiotics in every meal, Pritch eventually beat the bug, and Jenny and I moved out of the living room—and training began.

I wanted Pritch to be a retriever—a dog that would retrieve the doves and ducks I shot out of the sky. But every gun dog must clear three hurdles on her way to the field. She must not be afraid to swim. She must not be gun shy. And she must be comfortable retrieving real birds.

It’s simple, really. Force a pup into water, especially cold water, and chances are she’ll never want to go back. Shoot a gun over a pup’s head before she’s become accustomed to loud noises and she’ll run for the hinterlands—every time you fire. And finally, work all you want with rubber bumpers, but if a pup never gets a real bird in her mouth, you can’t expect her to pick up a mouthful of feathers on a hunt. In other words, the dog was mine to screw up.