Ajax with a fallow deer skin

It’s been quite a while since we last posted, long enough that a few of our dog enthusiast friends expressed concern. We’re all fine, dogs included, but recent months have been rather full with work, caring for the dogs, training and preparing for the German hunting exams in March. It’s amazing how much preparation is required in a wide range of subject areas. So the next month and a half will be more of the same, only more so.

In late October and November, Ajax and I had the privilege of taking part in five party hunts in beater teams. He had his first contacts with wild boar, caught his first hare and generally showed great potential.  I am looking forward to bringing him through his spring natural abilities test this April (lots more work for that – with Barack too). In February Monique and I will repeat the dog handler’s course offered by the Fläming-Havelland Deutsch Drahthaar club. And somewhere in all this we’ll try to find time to eat and sleep….

The picture above is of Ajax playing with a deer skin left over from a lesson in butchering that was part of my hunting course. All three dogs had a great time working with the skin.

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.

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!

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