Scott Linden Outdoors

Many hands, yada, yada, yada.

Birds make a bird dog. So do new places, incremental training challenges, distractions, and peer “pressure.”

A small training group is the perfect laboratory: for measuring your own training progress, seeing how others train, for your dogs’ socialization and advancement. If you’re selfish, check out now. Because the rest of this blog is about mutual benefit.

Newbie or nimrod, if you’re not learning from everyone else’s successes and mistakes you’re simply not paying attention. Or don’t care (see previous paragraph and please check out). Or you’re dead (and permanently checked out). A group can simulate the mob scene of hunt test galleries/judges – your dogs need that conditioning and so do you. “Many hands make light work,” planting birds, gunning, holding a checkcord. Who doesn’t appreciate a sincere acknowledgment of a job well done by dog or human?

Unless you consider yourself the dog training equivalent of Stephen Hawking, someone will eventually say or do something that is pretty damn useful. And vice-versa. Perspective is a two-way street. Wisdom is not reserved for the mature, great ideas come from every quarter. Questions lead to surprisingly insightful answers, sometimes from unlikely sources. If you’re not pondering all that happened on the way home (or in our case, while draining an IPA together) you are not getting your money’s worth from your group.

Some things simply can’t be done solo. Realistic training on everything from steadiness to shooting, for example. How many training scenarios have you created, then wished you had one more hand? Or you need birds. Launchers. Bigger yard. Or a steady dog to back. Or someone to bounce ideas past. An answerer-of-dumb-questions. Maybe you just want to know you’re not screwing up your dog. You get the idea.

And that’s before you measure your contribution to your own circle, the sport, habitat and those just starting out. As was said many years ago, “lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.” Which are you?