Training Pointing Dogs

Tells how to choose the right breed for your personality and hunting and includes training tips for housebreaking and basic living commands. Techniques for introducing the gun, achieving staunchness on point, advanced field quartering and retrieving, preventing problem behaviors of deer chasing, blinking, gun shyness, hardmouth, short stopping.

Includes the care and training of all pointing breeds. Gives your pup the right start with sound basics in the first formative weeks of training and moves on to more advanced lessons, quartering, staunchness, steadiness to wing and shot, backing another dog. Helps you train your dog to a higher standard.

With its combination of informative instruction and beautiful photography, this is the only training book you'll need to raise a great dog for home and field. Ronnie Smith Kennels provides trainers, owners, and dog handlers with the most refined, developed, and proven methodology for training a pointing dog. The Smith family has spent two generations working thousands of dogs through a stair-step method of replicable techniques that result in a bird dog that is well adjusted, confident, and driven to fulfill its potential. Training Bird Dogs with Ronnie Smith Kennels shares that tradition of excellence and insight with a broader public. A great bird dog is a combination of great genetics, optimal exposure to game, and proven training. This book provides clear, concise lessons that enable owners and trainers to see their dogs as individuals and maximize those individual talents. Yet the lessons go deeper too, illuminating frequent mistakes and the process for correcting them. Written with a keen understanding of how owners go astray, this book allows even a first-time owner the opportunity to work through the phases of training a bird dog. From developing a confident puppy to introducing live birds, this book is an essential reference for both bird dogs and their owners.

This is a revised and expanded second edition.

There is nothing more pleasing to an avid bird hunter than to watch a well-trained sporting dog do what it was bred to do: hunt. Likewise, there is nothing more pleasing to a pet owner than to watch their well-trained family dog interact in a calm and controlled manner with family and friends. With step-by-step instructions and detailed photographs and illustrations, this book provides proven information for achieving the best of both those worlds. Everything is discussed from choosing a sporting breed (retriever or pointer), to basic family-friendly obedience commands, to introducing the dog to the sound of a gun, competing in field trials and hunt tests, using an electronic collar, and keeping your sporting dog happy and healthy. It even covers how the nation's top trainers troubleshoot some of the more common problems faced in the field.

Expert instructions in the training method of Delmar Smith, winner of ten national championships, are supplmented with photographs of the fine points and problem situations