I received the following notice from The Retriever Journal and was encouraged to pass it along.
Train in That Order
by Steve Smith
There’s an old saying about kids I remember from my teaching days: “You are what you were when you were ten.” I always thought it was about 12, but the thrust of the idea is that the values and nearly all of the important skills are pretty well in place at a young age, and the changes in course to come are merely directional shifts to allow for the winds of experience.
I think it’s that way with dogs and their amateur trainers. I think that by the time a dog’s three years old, he’s pretty much the dog he’s going to be. Sure, he’ll get more experience and learn to be a little more savvy about the birds, and about that time you’ll notice that he’ll start to pace himself. But those are things he teaches himself, which defines experience. His formal training, though, is about as complete as it’s going to get. At this point, we just take him hunting.
What’s the point here? No matter what you plan to teach the dog, what skills he needs to learn, has to be done early on in his life, when the brain is young and developing. There’s a lot of truth about old dogs and new tricks – have any of you over 50 tried to learn to operate a computer from scratch? It’s the same with your dog.
So decide what skills your dog has to know, what ones you would like him to know, and what skills it would be nice for him to know but it’s no big deal. Then, train for them in that order.
