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Published in New York Times, September 30th, 2005.

When the Spaniels Attend a Clinic to Get Game
By CHARLES FERGUS

I own a young English cocker spaniel. My wife named him Havoc. Middle name, Chaos. He delights in eating moose droppings, rolling on dead shrews and chewing sticks to flinders. Bright-eyed and curious, he is tirelessly, tiresomely into everything.

When Havoc was six months old, to ensure that neither havoc nor chaos reign as a part of his character, I enrolled us both in a two-day training clinic at Copake, N.Y. The clinic was aimed at cocker and springer spaniels: dogs that find and flush woodcock, grouse and pheasants, and, if the birds are shot, fetch them.

Fred Bradley, owner of the Hawthorne Kennel and a professional trainer of spaniels, played host to the event. The clinician was Wendy Knight, a highly respected spaniel trainer and field trial judge from Colchester, England.

Knight, a short, bespectacled, gray-haired woman with a slight stoop, explained that "any well-bred spaniel will wish to hunt." Our goal, she said, should be to "get the dog with you - channel its natural instinct in such a way that it will produce game for the gun."

Field-bred cockers are not the flossy specimens seen trotting on the end of a leash at Westminster. My Havoc is typical for the breed: low and long, deep-chested, powerful and smart. His great-grandsire is a dog Knight once owned - a dog she was unable to make into a field champion, because, she told me, he figured out she could not discipline him during the structured setting of a trial and began ignoring her commands.

I'm not a complete neophyte when it comes to spaniels - I've trained two springers and written several books about hunting dogs - and I realized before I bought Havoc that some cockers could be quite willful. As one British trainer has said of the breed, "The little scamps are full of character, and it is not all good." But they can make excellent bird dogs - if they're trained properly.

The 10 dogs at the clinic included five cockers and five springers. Their handlers each had a spaniel whistle, made from a piece of water-buffalo horn, on a lanyard dangling around the neck. With our dogs on leash, we entered a grassy field scattered with dogwood and wild rose.
To be effective, a spaniel must hunt within 10 to 20 yards of its handler. It must glance at the handler regularly to pick up on the subtle hand motions indicating where it should go. It must respond to voice and whistle commands promptly. Two whistle pips tell it to turn about-face and hunt back in the opposite direction. A more sustained whistle note or the vocal command "Hup" orders the dog to plant its behind on the ground and keep it there.

We took turns, with each pair working separately under Knight's tutelage. She instructed the human half of the team on how to direct the dog to hunt all of the brush where game might be hiding. This involved the human moving forward slowly as the dog ran a zigzag pattern.
Periodically, Knight would make a whiffling sound with her voice - mimicking a bird flushing - and hurl a training dummy (a foam-filled boat bumper to which pheasant feathers were taped) through the air. The moment it saw the thrown dummy, the dog was expected to hup. After the dummy landed, Knight would tell the handler to release the dog: the spaniel would dash out, sniff around until it located the dummy, pick it up in its mouth and fetch the thing back.

When Havoc's turn came, it quickly became apparent that I had an independent lad on my hands, as well as an inexperienced one. We had worked on quartering from side to side in the fields near our Vermont home. But now Havoc paid no attention to me, darting off into the brush to smell the myriad interesting scents there. Knight ran over and berated him. She grabbed him by the scruff beneath his chin and dragged him back to where he should have been hunting.
After several such corrections, Havoc began covering the terrain closer to me. He trotted along at a third of his normal speed, trying to sort things out in his mind. Knight had me leave the slip-leash on him; it trailed behind, giving me something to grab hold of.

When he ignored the whistle, I snagged the leash and made him turn, reinforcing the correction by giving the two-pip "Turn" command. By the afternoon of the second day, Havoc was much more biddable. (He was also worn out from the stress of needing to behave.)

Clear, timely commands - in addition to the occasional "boomin' good verbal," as Knight put it - had helped focus him. We ended our final session with a thrown dummy. Havoc brought it to my hand. Then he sat and looked me in the eye as if to say, "O.K., boss, what's next?"

What's next are months of training. And I shouldn't expect it all to go well. As Knight said: "If you haven't got a sense of humor, don't get a cocker. They're always thinking of something different and evil to do."

Charles Fergus's latest book is "A Hunter's Book of Days" (Countrysport Press, 2005).