Dave Walker & Myself
Two weeks ago I had the oppourtuntiy to spend some time with Dave Walker. Dave is a bird dog legend, as he fielded questions from my self and other attendee’s I was amazed at the way he made each of us feel like our questions were important. One time I heard him mention that he has taken over 3,000 placements with his dogs. That’s a heck a lot of ribbons. There were a couple of great things I learned from Dave one of which was to stop talking to your dogs. Most of time people talk way to much to there dogs. For example I remember one guy that brought his dog out and Dave was going to shoot a bird for the dog. The dog went on point, up came the bird, Dave killed it and the dog didn’t mark the bird very well. Next thing you know the guy was saying go get it, fetch it up, find it, and a how bunch of different words I can’t remember. The gentleman had that dog so confused it didn’t know whether it was coming or going. So off went the owner and the dog trying to find the bird at which point Dave looked at me and said the best training tool ever made is a piece of duck tape. I knew what he meant. We had a little laugh and I learned an important lesson. Your dog can’t talk back to you so why in the world would you try to teach the dog 60 different commands. What I learned from Dave is that you can teach a dog a lot of things with his training collar and checkord. Mixed with a few pets and a tap on the side you don’t even have to say a word to the dog and you can teach it to stand on point and be steady to wing and shot. This is completely different to what I have seen in the past where I would be trying to teach a dog whoa to make the dog stop. Dave did this with out saying a word to the dogs and I watched him do it to over 25 dogs in two days. Now you do need to teach your dog to whoa but there sure is a better way to do it. Dave’s method’s put very little stress on the dogs and I sure do look forward to learning more from him in the years to come.
