Ajax will be three years old this year on October 4th. Had everything worked out last year with his autumn hunting test (HZP), he would now be qualified as a stud dog under the rules of the German breed association. But last year I had a lot of trouble with his breeder and at home, and when the breeder of Ajax’s mother tried to buy him off me and offered to take him through the test in exchange for a few stud services, I reluctantly agreed so that I could concentrate on other matters. Big mistake. Although the man is a professional breeder and dog handler with hundreds of tests on his record (or over 1000 he claims), he doesn’t know my dog, and he arrogantly ignored my comments that pressure (negative reinforcement, punishment) would get him exactly nowhere with the dog. He failed utterly to prepare him for the test, and five months later I got my dog back with some effort: starved, shit-smeared and broken. He was terrified of nearly everything, and I was told that he would even run away during water work. I would have too if someone treated me like that.

I’ve spent the time since mid-December 2010 rebuilding my dog and his confidence. He will never leave my side again and be put in the hand of “traditionalists” with their Jurassic notions of training and discipline. Unfortunately, my dog is now basically “untested”; this year he must at least take and pass his utility test in order to maintain insurance for hunting after his third birthday. If I want to breed him in Germany, that will now only be possible if he passes the country’s most advanced test for working hunting dogs, the Verbandsgebrauchsprüfung (VGP). It’s a two-day event with nearly every presumably relevant aspect of hunting with the dog and obedience being put to the test. This test requires that dogs retrieve foxes in several of its disciplines. Most dogs don’t want to do this, and the traditionalists often apply a lot of pressure to a dog to get him to cooperate. Not an option for Ajax.

However, some day I would like to breed him, so I spoke with my friend Ingeborg Caminneci, a dog breeder with many decades of experience with sensitive breeds. I had tried intermittently for two years to get Ajax to retrieve a fox, even taking him with me on a recent business trip to Hungary so he could work on this there with an experienced trainer. No success. Following the spirit of Ingeborg’s advice, Ajax was voluntarily retrieving the fox within 10 minutes. Here’s how he works after just two days:

VGP here we come!

The birthday boy

Ajax is one year old today. This morning we went to the hunting grounds in Hennigsdorf for a training session and hunt with his breeder, Uwe Herrmann, and another hunter with a recently acquired 7 month old Deutsch Drahthaar. The last time we met up with Uwe, Ajax was having a bad day and was totally unfocused in his search and was generally a twit. Since mastering the fetch, however, he has been a transformed dog, highly motivated for just about everything. He began retrieving dummies and game from practice trails only recently, but already works reliably over distances of several hundred meters. He is extremely motivated in his searching and simply does not give up, even with distractions like other dogs running free. He searches for birds and boars in thick reeds until his eyes are scratched bloody, and he never slows down. He enters water to search immediately on command. And today he had his first experiences with flushing deer and pheasant and retrieving a shot duck from a canal. His birthday drake.

After the shot dropped the drake in the middle of the canal, I gave Ajax the German command to retrieve it (“Apport!”). The bank was heavily overgrown, so it took him a little while to make his way to the water, but he plunged in and started swimming, not quite sure what it was all about I think, because he had not seen the duck fall. When he sighted it, he began to yip with excitement and swam straight toward it, took it in a perfect grip in his mouth and brought it straight to me on the shore. A flawless performance that would have passed the fall hunting test he’ll take around this time next year.

On a few occasions in the five months I’ve had him, I’ve wondered about whether Ajax was very bright or whether other attributes were all they should be. However, it’s become very clear that he has superb potential as a hunter. And he has also proven to be a wonderful member of the family, and he is very gentle and patient with the puppy, Barack. I think he may make a good member of Monique’s therapy team after she gets her qualification next year.

Barack (formerly known as Mr. Brown) is growing and learning quickly. Largely from observing his father and Uncle Ajax, at 13 weeks he has learned to come, sit, lie down, hop into and out of the car on command, stop and sit and street corners, release things in his mouth on command, fetch objects at a distance, jump and take on command and occasionally stay despite a tail that tries to wag him into orbit. And he has probably learned a number of other things that I’ve forgotten or don’t know about yet.

As it is our intention to hunt with him, it’s important to expose him to game at an early age. He has taken a great interest in a few birds that he has found in the woods or that Ajax has caught, but he hasn’t really had much to do with mammals yet. So when I saw two raccoons and a ferret freshly killed on my way to shooting practice for my hunting course, I pulled over quickly and collected them. Barack found the raccoon quite interesting.

Now what do I do with THIS thing?

Since a raccoon is a bit heavy for retrieving and this one was no longer very fresh after spending the day in a hot car without air conditioning, I removed the tail to use for string-and-pole training. Barack grabbed the tail and defended it against Ajax, who was also eager to have the tail. Fortunately there were two raccoons, so each got a tail.

Mine! All MINE!!!

Here’s a picture of Barack triumphant after catching the tail on the string:

Gotcha!

Approaches to training a hunting dog to retrieve vary widely. As novice trainers, we trained our oldest dog Ari more by instinct than anything else, playing games and utilizing his natural desire to work. He is an excellent retriever capable of persistent long-range blind searches and it is very rare that difficulties occur. (He has other issues, but retrieving is not and probably never will be one.) With Ajax, things started out differently. His breeder has been very generous with his time as a hunting mentor, and in the beginning of my time with Ajax I trained with him as he worked with two bitches from the same litter and various other dogs and hunters. This was my introduction to the traditional force fetch. There are many variations to this, but the one that I was exposed to is on the extreme end of force, so much so that after twenty minutes of a “lesson” inflicted by his breeder, my dog was emotionally battered and did not respond in a normal way for days. As a result, in later sessions I made it clear that no one would work with my dog but me.

Teaching Ajax to fetch has been a very different process than with Ari. A very slow process. Although the traditionalists like his breeder believe that only extremes of pressure and relief will produce a truly “reliable” dog in the field, my own observations contradict this. Once I backed off on the pressure and pain and used positive reinforcement instead real progress began. The learning process stalled only when I began to rely on forceful methods, such as pulling the dog forward with a choke chain to get him to open his mouth and take the retrieval object.

I remembered a story – I think it was in the infamous book by Carl Tabel, a German dog trainer who is probably burning in Hell for the misery that interpretations and misinterpretations of his writings have caused to be inflicted on dogs – in which a dog who did not respond at all to force methods suddenly learned quickly and became a reliable retriever after the desperate trainer started to work with a ball the dog had discovered. So I began to use objects that Ajax wanted to take, like pheasant wings and dummies covered with rabbit fur (and doused with scent). When these were alternated with wooden measuring sticks and other less desirable objects, he took everything gladly and enjoyed the praise for doing so.

But we stalled trying to get him to move forward to take the object, and he would not pick anything off the ground. We stayed at this stage for weeks while I tried the awful methods I was told I must use, which involved a lot of strangling and ear-pulling. Actually I cheated there… I took a pass on the ear pulling. My mentor lectured me repeatedly that the failure to progress was my fault and that I must discipline myself to be harsher to the dog and inflict more pain to break him to my will. The fact that I wasn’t using a spiked choke chain was probably also a further sign of my weakness and incompetence. But no matter how many stupid lectures I listened to about the Way of the Wolf and how my dog will thank me in the end for brutalizing it (I wonder if some child abusers think that way), all I had to do was look at Ajax’s body language and the body language of his sisters, mother and other dogs in his breeder’s kennel, and it was clear that not only was this not the way for this dog – this could never be the way for me. I am perfectly capable of harsh discipline for a dog when I feel it is necessary, and sometimes I carry it too far. When Ajax tried to kill my cat after she scratched his nose I might have hurt him very badly if Monique had not intervened. But to hurt a dog to effect so-called learning is simply repugnant to me, and I think it is counter-productive.

In the end, the solution was simple. Very simple. I simply told Ajax to sit, and I stepped back a few paces and offered a desirable object to take. He moved forward and took it in his mouth. Then I put it a few paces on the ground and used the same command, reinforced occasionally by a “come”, “sit” or a reminder to hold tight (a no-brainer if he’s chomping down on a deerskin dummy). Then I started trying it with canvas dummies. It worked. Wooden dowels worked. Staplers. Ball point pens. Keys. Bottles. Chains. Pine cones. Whatever I offered, Ajax retrieved gladly with no force applied. Now I’m sure that when the local hunters hear this, many of them will continue to tell me I am at risk of ruining the dog by being so soft, that I must set up a situation where he will refuse or fail so I can impose my will and make him truly “reliable”. All that shit sounds a lot like military training in the days of Frederick the Great, where soldiers were supposed to be more afraid of their own officers than of the enemy. Well, modern armies know better. Modern dog trainers too. But just to shut the idiots up, I went out and bought a spiked choke chain. Next time I meet up with the breeder and his hunting companions to train our dogs, I’ll pull that instrument of torture out and display it with the tale of how all I had to do was “show” it to Ajax and he began cooperating. And it’s true. He was with me when I bought the damned thing, and I promised him he would never wear it in training.

Not as terrifying as a comfy chair, but effective nonetheless

I made a wonderful discovery this morning while reading the online edition of the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof wrote an opinion piece with book recommendations for children this summer and mentioned “Lad, a Dog” with the comment that “This is to ‘Lassie’ what Shakespeare is to CliffsNotes.” A statement like that will catch my attention any time. So I looked up the author on Wikipedia and discovered that some of his work is available free on Project Gutenberg. Right now I’m reading a wonderful story – “His Dog” – about a Collie with a broken leg rescued by the roadside as well as “The Further Adventures of Lad“. I had never heard of the author, Albert Payson Terhune, but I guess this is just further evidence of the treasures buried in the past and worth digging for.

Ajax with his first pigeon

Ajax is obsessed with birds. Anything with wings, actually – even moths (he’ll point at those). Today he’s nine months old, and I’ve had him for a bit over two months. Every morning when I take him for a walk in the local forest, he rushes around pointing at blackbirds, pigeons, woodpeckers or anything else with feathers that he sees or smells. He’s grabbed two baby blackbirds in the garden. (I wasn’t thrilled about that, nor was Ari, who took the last one away from him and brought it to us, probably expecting us to help considering his upset behavior.)

Yesterday I was coming back from a long walk in the woods with the dog, and Ajax was carrying a tennis ball that he had been retrieving. Suddenly he stopped, dropped the ball and pointed at the bushes. Crept forward slowly and pointed again. Then pounced. A pigeon exploded from the bush, and Ajax leaped after it, knocking it out of the air with his paw. It flew up again and he leaped and grabbed it in his jaws and brought it directly to me. It was alive and lively, and at first I thought it was undamaged. Then the blood sprayed from its mouth all over me and it was dead. It’s a fat bird; if I knew how to prepare it there would be a good meal to come of it.

Since our Wire-haired Vizsla, Quodians Aristos, joined the family a bit over a year ago, I’ve developed a growing interest in hunting dogs and hunting which has only been reinforced by the Deutsch Drahthaar, Ajax, who joined our household at the end of April.

Falconer with dog & gun

In August I’ll start studying for my German hunting license. This isn’t something I had anticipated doing before; hunting is not part of my family tradition, and I’m the sort who is more likely to try to save whales and hug trees. At the same time, I have seen the unfortunate effects of hunting bans from California to Berlin, where the efforts of well-meaning animal protection advocates lead to cougars munching small children and joggers and dangerous wild boar wandering around in city traffic.

The German approach to hunting licensure has a very healthy part of intelligent wildlife and habitat management in it. And dogs represent a vital part of the efforts to ensure a humane hunt as well as track animals injured on the roads, for example. They undergo strict testing to ensure that the responsibilities of animal protection are met during the hunt or in tracking for whatever purpose.

Because of my new interest, I’ve been doing a lot of reading of German texts on hunting and kynology. Despite being reasonably fluent in German, I have encountered a lot of new terms which I have to look up or ask others to explain. There are also some interesting translation projects under discussion which will require a good mastery of Waidmannssprache (“hunter-speak”) in particular. So with that in mind, I’ve done a bit of research on possible online and offline terminology resources, which is listed below for the benefit of anyone with similar interests or needs.

Hardcopy dictionaries:

Elsevier’s Dictionary of Nature and Hunting in English, French, Russian, German and Latin.

Elsevier’s Dictionary of the World’s Game and Wildlife in English, Latin, French, German, Dutch and Spanish With Equivalents in Afrikaans and Kiswahi.

Wörterbuch der Weidmannssprache für Jagd- und Sprachfreunde – A monolingual German book explaining hunters’ terminology

Wörterbuch der Weidmannssprache – Another monolingual German book explaining hunters’ terminology

Online glossaries:

Jagdwörterbuch – a nice little lookup tool that shows “normal” German, the English term and the special German hunting terminology.

Waidmanssprache – A monolingual German reference explaining hunters’ language.

WebTerm hunting dog terms – A fairly sophisticated taxonomy of terms in German and English. I think it uses MultiTerm Online, and it doesn’t work very well with the Firefox, though all functions seem to be OK with Internet Explorer.

Jagd und Wild Wörterbuch – Sloppy but possibly useful. There are serious problems with the English spelling and capitalization in the octolingual glossary. The sorting function is nice. This looks like another one where Internet Explorer may be necessary; I looked at it in a Firefox tab too, and the scroll bar wasn’t visible and sorting didn’t work.

The other resources I found were too awful to list. If anyone else knows of good terminology resources for German in this area, I’d like to hear about them.

Over the course of the last year, three of Ari’s paws were sliced open by broken glass in the forest. There’s an amazing amount of it; we pick it up constantly on walks, but every day new bits emerge from the soil. You would think that the shards were a sort of silicate mushroom they way the proliferate after a warm summer rain.

Dangerous trash - glass and bits of metal gathered in just ten minutes of walking on the local forest trails.

Ari isn’t the only victim; we have met other dogs on walks or at the local vet whose feet are bandaged after stepping on glass. The local drunks and youth that go into the woods to party obviously don’t give a damn about the consequences of smashing bottles; recently three kids were caught shooting glass bottles with an air gun in a meadow that many dogs play in. I really wonder what is wrong with these people, why they want to take such a beautiful place and turn it into a dangerous pig pen. The consequences for such anti-social behavior are pretty minimal, but then Germany is a country where you can stab someone and get out of jail in a few months for good behavior if you go at all. A comforting thought to someone planning murder perhaps, but not exactly conducive to good social order. Thus increasingly thugs, graffiti “artists” and polluters feel free to do as they please. Aside from my intention to personally feed the broken glass to anyone I catch smashing it by the trails, there’s not much to be done I suppose. Except pick up what we can and hope that the shard I clean up today won’t go into my dog’s foot or my neighbor’s dog’s foot tomorrow. And maybe we’ll have a potluck barbecue later this summer and clean up as much of what we can – the cut-open safes, the oven parts, power cable coverings, smashed car batteries and other detritus that human swine have spraed around in an otherwise very beautiful place. Oh, and I suppose I should look into better boots for the dogs, but so far all the ones we’ve tried go flying off them after just a few minutes of play.

There's a boar in that fern!

Last Saturday I was invited to take Ajax and go to a local Saugatter (aka Schwarzwildgatter, a wild boar enclosure) in Zehdenick to watch the dogs train. There are basically two types of Saugatter – a large enclosed area for hunting or raising significant numbers of animals and smaller facilities of a few acres with a small number of relatively tame boars for training hunting dogs. The place in Zehdenick falls into the latter category.

It’s generally a good idea to register in advance before showing up for one of the weekend training dates. The law restricts the number of dogs to which the sows can be exposed, and after six dogs there is a mandatory break, after which no more than six more dogs can be tested. These are mostly young dogs with little or no experience with boars, and this is an opportunity for them to become familiar with them under relatively safe, controlled conditions. The practice area was a bit over two hectares and contained three sows. The dogs are supposed to search independently for the animals, find them, and stay with them while barking to notify the hunter. Sounds easy, right? Well, according to Maik Weingärtner, the forester who manages the facility, fewer than 10% of the inexperienced dogs are able to manage this task. Even with additional training and support, no more than 30 to 35% of dogs of any breed work reliably with the boars under these controlled conditions.

On the day I visited the Saugatter there was quite a variety of hunting dogs being tested.

Hunters watching the dogs work

There were about half a dozen Deutsch Drahthaar (German Wire-haired) dogs like my Ajax, a Weimeraner, a Wire-haired Dachshund and the rest German Hunting Terriers. Most of the terriers – a breed generally noted for their toughness on the hunt – were referred to by one of the referees as “Papi-Küsser” (“papa kissers”), because they failed to show the “right stuff”. The toughest dog of the day was the dachshund, who followed the boars relentlessly until he was called off. The Deutsch Drahthaars were testing for a special VDD distinction for boar skills, but only three passed – one more by the mercy of lax referees than by actual achievement.

For a dog to be allowed to work the boars at the Saugatter, the owner must bring the pedigree, immunization records and a valid hunting license.

Some animal rights activists disapprove of facilities like this, claiming that the boars are too stressed. However, studies of saliva samples by Professor Wunderlich have shown that this is not the case, and when the time came for a break, one of the referees walked over to a sow, cuddled her and gave her a few dog treats. Even when the dogs get too close, the sows ward them off rather more gently than wild ones would. The purpose of these facilities is to provide a safe environment for training the dogs in order for them to work later with the greatest degree of safety and efficiency and minimize the suffering of animals which may be wounded. Although the conditions in the enclosure are by no means an exact reflection of the environment that may be encountered on an actual hunt, they are good ones in which to prepare a dog safely for circumstances in which it may otherwise lose its life or fail to assist in the relief of suffering for a wounded animal.

For those who read German, there is an interesting report (in German) from the Weser Bremen German Short Hair Club on their visit to the facility on a previous occasion.

"Things were mellow until that dachshund showed up...."

There is one behavior from our new pack member that drives both Monique and me more than a little nuts. It’s his tendency to steal things and bury them in the garden. It seems that anything which catches his eye is game:  Ari’s toys, our couch pillows, shoes, garden trowels and other tools are on the “disappeared” list so far.

Off to bury the boar!

German hunters call a dog with this behavior a Totengräber, which means “gravedigger”. It is understandably frowned upon and guaranteed to lead to failure on a hunting test. So in addition to solving this problem because it is highly annoying, we must do so if this dog is to have any future as a hunter. According to the breeder, his two siblings that were kept have the same problem. The dogs played in an enclosed area near their kennel, where they discovered an old trash dump with enticing items like shoes. I assume they were not supervised as they then attempted to conceal their prizes from litter mates by burying them. Ajax attempted the same thing on the only occasion I allowed him to retrieve game: he took a pigeon which Ari had previously retrieved and ran off to bury it in the woods. Very bad. Now how on Earth am I supposed to fix this problem with positive reinforcement methods? It will be an interesting bit of research to discover if this is possible.