574 
FOREST AND STREAM 
October, 1920 
TRAINING THE PUPPY 
A LETTER FROM ONE OF OUR CORRESPONDENTS REVEALS 
SOME PRACTICAL, COMMON-SENSE IDEAS ON THE SUBJECT 
By DR. FRANK T. WOODBURY 
THE 
MAN 
OF THE 
FOREST 
By Zane Grey 
has a message on every page 
of life lived gloriously in the 
open, of adventure, of daring, 
of romance, of the wonder of 
forest and mountain. More 
than a million readers have 
thrilled to this romance of the 
Arizona mountains — this novel 
of a hidden paradise and how 
a man and woman found love 
together in the shadow of the 
encircling mountains and in the 
deeper shadow of the danger 
that lurked behind them. Illus- 
trated. $2.00. 
THE PEDDLER 
By Henry C. Rowland 
Another delightful and really 
mysterious mystery story cen- 
tering around that gang of in- 
ternational crooks of which 
Chu-Chu La Tondeur was the 
founder. It is an intriguing 
tale of this band’s operations 
in a rich American colony. 
$ 1 - 75 . 
ALL-WOOL 
MORRISON 
By Holman Day 
A high - speed, twenty - hour 
cross-section of American life. 
This story of a young mayor’s 
fight to save several millions 
for his state — at the risk of the 
love of the one woman — makes 
a novel humorous, and human, 
and true. (Frontispiece. $190.) 
CALIBAN 
By W. L . George 
is the story of “Bulmer” — a 
man with a genius for success, 
with the power to control the 
destiny of a nation, but who 
was unable to regulate his own. 
And it was love which taught 
him his weakness. $2.00. 
THE THREAD 
OF FLAME 
By Basil King 
is the story of a modern Enoch 
Arden who, having “come back 
from the dead,” finds his wife 
strangely insistent that they 
bridge their years of separation 
with silence. A searching 
novel. Illustrated. $2.00. 
m'v HARPER & BROTHERS K 
MULTI - BENEDICT 
once said: “I have 
had five wives and no 
two of them were 
alike.” The writer 
has had more than 
five times five dogs 
and his experience 
leads him to believe 
that almost the same 
could be truthfully 
said of the five and 
twenty or more dogs. 
I do not recall one who didn’t have 
some good traits or many who didn’t 
have something to be desired in addition- 
al “high school” training. Many times 
I have regretted that I could not more 
fully make a dog understand me and then 
I have taken off my hat and apologized 
for not having brains or instinct enough 
to understand what he was doing or for 
doubting his accuracy. I thank a kind 
destiny that didn’t make me a good dog 
with a “mut” owner or trainer. 
My own excuse for rearing and train- 
ing bird dogs for my own use is that I 
enjoy the sport from every angle, treat 
my dogs well and do the best I know how 
for them. I believe that at least nine dogs 
in every ten (I am speaking only of bird 
dogs) are spoiled by poor handling, and I 
also believe that nine in every ten could 
have been made satisfactory shooting 
companions if intelligently handled from 
pu'ppyhood. If there are no two wives 
alike and no two dogs alike neither are 
there two owners and trainers exactly 
alike. The older you grow and the more 
experience you have, the more you real- 
ize how little you really know, and how 
much less you knew when you thought 
you knew a whole lot more than you know 
you know now. This can only be attained 
by experience. 
Your puppy needs almost as much care 
and protection as your child. It is quite 
as important to foresee, forestall, or 
avoid bad habits and accidents as to teach 
proper action in the field. I believe that 
many promising pups have been found to 
be gun-shy who would have deported 
themselves very differently if they had 
been properly guarded during their first 
Fourth of July. I know of a beautiful 
pointer, a little brother of one of the 
finest bird dogs in Massachusetts, who 
was utterly ruined by children with tor- 
pedoes and crackers. Perhaps he could 
have been broken of his gun-shyness but 
his owner was so disgusted at finding him 
gun-shy that he discarded him. Another 
puppy was so frightened by railroad tor- 
pedoes during shipment that a gun shot 
sent him cowering to the rear, doubtless 
remembering that long, tiresome ride in a 
stuffy little box. 
Then there are hundreds of little things 
to be avoided as well as taught, and no 
two dogs can be handled exactly alike. 
One dog may require considerable severity, 
another must be handled with silk gloves. 
One requires teaching, restriction and cor- 
rection. Another needs very little teaching 
and no punishing. The greatest thing I 
have ever learned in breaking bird dogs 
is to adapt myself to the dog. For exam- 
ple, I have a female pointer who knew our 
game from egg to pocket. At about seven 
years her ear drums were injured by a 
youngster who shot so close to her head 
that I thought he had killed her. She 
was soon stone deaf. Now the whole pro- 
cedure had to be revised. I could no 
longer be “baso” in the field; words and 
whistles were useless. Her vision was 
not good and an occasional wave of the 
hand was the only possible interference 
on my part. She was slow and very care- 
ful, quartered her ground over carefully, 
and kept in sight of me. When she 
found game she pointed and waited. If 
by any chance I did not see and come 
to her she returned to the last place where 
she had seen me and came up on my 
track. Then she led away and I pussy- 
footed behind. If I fell too far behind 
she waited. When she made her final 
point the birds were almost under her 
nose and the shots were all easy straight- 
aways; doubles were frequent and easy. 
There were no words, whistles dr racing 
through the bushes to alarm the game, 
consequently they were not frightened and 
lay close. I never found game so easily, 
nor so plentiful, never wasted so little 
time in reaching them, never had such 
good shots nor killed so many birds with 
so few misses as with that old, deaf dog. 
After a while it filtered through my 
thick skull that she was quite as anxious 
to find birds as I was. Also that her deaf 
and dumb brute-instinct was a blamed 
sight more successful than my superior 
human intellect. 
After that I would drag her by force 
and Ford to what I considered a likely 
locality and let her find the birds if there 
were any. Which reminds me that she used 
to find birds in spots where my superior 
intelligence told me there were none, 
but she, not knowing there should be none 
there at that time of the day would creep 
right in and find them. I learned many 
lessons from her and since then have let 
my dogs find the birds. They are more 
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