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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundation’s podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about how we think about our dogs and our dog breeds and why that can get us into trouble. Look, humans are goofy in a lot of ways. For example, my Instagram feed is full of a few things. Fish just clabbering topwater lures all over the world, dogs while doing dog stuff, which should come as no surprise to anyone, And a hell of a lot of people getting injured while attempting to rope, swing over lakes, or parkour on small ledges, drive vehicles over and through objects that won’t allow a whole lot of safe passage. Now, as a group, we have those kinds of people and the individuals like myself and I hope you who would never attempt most of those things, even if we could get a lot of social media clout for it. While this might seem like it has nothing to do with it does and that’s what I’m going to talk about right now. If you could hop into the wayback machine and program it to take you to May eighteenth to twenty twelve, you would have a chance to buy stock in Facebook, which ipo’d on that date for just thirty eight bucks a share, you could have gotten in on the ground floor. Now, while it did eventually sink to eighteen bucks a share for a while, it didn’t stay there very long, and Zuck and crew have done a pretty good job of building a giant company that nearly prints money. Today those shares would be worth just shy of eight hundred bucks, which means if you had dumped just a grand in on that IPO date, you’d be sitting on twenty thousand dollars today in meta, which is what Facebook turned into a few years back. Not a bad return, And how did they do it? Well? They figured out how to get anyone and everyone to sign up for their own personal page to show off their latest meals and wish happy birthday to Grammar. Then they expanded. They started selling ads to us, since we are the audience and there was a hell of a lot of us. Over time, along the way, they bought a few other companies, including Instagram. Now, the real secret to the sauce was realizing what kind of content kept us engaged in angry, Because the more time we spend on their platforms, the more ads they can show us, and the more attention to platforms get from the general public and the media, the more the sites can grow. While it’s not all negative, social media thrives off of our tribalism. We love to think of ourselves as individuals while thinking of people who we don’t really know or who we disagree with, as one lump sum of two legged pond scum who would probably take a dump in our bowllet cheerios if we weren’t paying attention. It’s literally coded in our genes to be social and to crave belonging in small groups. It’s how we got to where we are today, because being alone throughout much of his was as close to a death sentence as it would be to jump into the nile at midnight to wrestle some crocodiles just for fun. That tribalism is on display all over and it sucks, even if it is a part of us now. It allows us to be comfortable with ourselves while feeling superior to others while they are being comfortable with themselves and feeling superior to us. We can’t help ourselves, and we do this when it comes to dogs too. Now. I’ve written about breed loyalty a lot, and I think it’s important to understand there is comfort in sticking with golden retrievers our whole lives, just like there’s comfort in fishing the same lake your family has had a cabin on since nineteen oh seven. After all, why mess with a good thing. Breed loyalty is partially about the breed, but also about allowing ourselves to feel like we belong to a group. The more popular a breed is, the less profoundnesses a lot of times, but not always. And if you’re into a I don’t know, a newer type of breed, or at least one this new to yer region or whatever, there can be a lot of personal identity tied into that type of dog we choose, and you can get extra super bonus points in this category if your chosen breed is truly rare. That allows us to feel special. And that’s a nice, warm blanket that we can pull up to our chins every night before we drift off to sleep. We know something the others don’t that our breed is awesome and the best, and there sucks a whole lot. But beyond this, there is a thing that happens to us with dogs that can get us into trouble in a variety of ways. It involves thinking about our dogs as total individuals, while also not quite understanding or acknowledging general traits and issues with specific breeds. I’ll give you an easy one here, Golden Retrievers and biting people. The thing about this is we think about dog attacks and the usual suspects here. If you want to feel better than someone, just talk to a pitbull owner who will inevitably tell you how loving and caring and gentle their dog is. And their dog might be, or it might just flip its bobber and attack in a way that could kill someone. Now, Golden Retrievers aren’t overly likely to kill someone, but they are more likely to bite people than a lot of folks care to admit. That doesn’t mean anyone should shy away from the breed, but instead should consider that while they are known for being goofy, lovable dogs, they also aren’t immune to aggression. The worst case of a bite in my circle of friends who all have dogs happened when my buddy’s son woke up their old female Golden retriever and she instantly snapped at him. He got a bunch of stitches in his face from a dog that I’d have bet real good money would go its whole career without injuring anyone. It can happen, and it highlights the difference between what we think about dogs in general and what they can be as individuals. Another way to look at this is the dangerous ground we get into when we want a certain breed for whatever reasons and we try to plug them into an unfair situation. Now, in the hunting community and just the general dog loving community as a whole, we love dogs that aren’t bred or normally used for a certain job, but then take to the role and shine brightly. In our world. You might see a little Jack Russell terrier who retrieves ducks all day, or someone else who decided a German short hair is just right for the duck blind. Sure, there are individual dogs that you can color pretty far outside the lines with, but in general, buying a German short hair and trying to get it to be a really good duck dog doesn’t make a lot of sense. This general sentiment has turned a lot of potentially good bird dogs into mostly house dogs, and as per usual, it’s not the dog’s fault. This is also a little like something else we do with dogs sometimes, which is assume they’ll be one way because they are a certain breed. An easy example here would be the problem I had with Sadie, my four year old lab, when she was a pup and I tried to get her into the water. I had never encountered a lab that just had a mental hard block on swimming, and it really never occurred to me that I would let alone, that I would own one, and that she would give me anxiety for a few months over this whole thing. Now. At one point I even interviewed a trainer from South Dakota who talked about this extensively, where he said that he runs into a pheramountal labs that need a lot of coaxing and a careful plan to get them introduced to water in a way where they wouldn’t be terrified. So think about this situation and the potential for danger. We have this idea that labs are all water dogs, and for good reason, they’ve been bred to retrieve in the water. They’re literally built for it and generally are very good at it. But that’s an overarching belief about a whole breed and not an individual case by case thing. Where we get into trouble here is not that we might have a dog that doesn’t conform to the breed standard on some te ask, but that some level of hesitancy on their part can cause a pretty quick level of frustration on ours. Dog training and dog ownership comes with enough obstacles, so when we have to deal with something we just didn’t expect, it can break bad in a hurry. But we need to look at our dogs as individuals, because they are and they are all quirky, and they all have their own things. Where this gets even trickier is that if you lean into this mindset too hard, the individual dog mindset mind you, you can give yourself plenty of reasons to give up on your dog in a certain way or excuse away bad behavior. Think about this like you would with kids. If you have a kid in elementary school that won’t behave and no one makes an attempt to mold his behavior in a better way because he comes from I don’t know, a rough home situation or seems to have some other confounding issues, then it’s never going to get better. That behavior is going to develop deep roots, and it won’t do him any favors as he grows up in the real world and all of its obligations come to calling. If you have a bird dog that doesn’t do something or is scared of something, and you give them a pass because you believe that’s just how your specific dog is wired, you gotta be careful. This is where acknowledging what the breed is and is known for matters. When you think about a lab that is terrified of water at four months, for example, you have two things going on. You have an individual that isn’t ready to take a swim yet, but it’s also the kind of dog that is very likely to enjoy the water when that mental dam breaks open. Your job isn’t to give him a pass on this because he doesn’t want to do it and it would be easier than trying to figure it out. Your job is to facilitate the introduction however you need to, in order to remind your lab that he is a lab. Let’s look at this another way. Have you ever spent time with an English cocker or maybe a Springer Spaniel. They bounce around with curly ears, flopping like adorable lunatics, and generally seem to kind of be having a party at all times. This is appealing as hell, because it is fun to have a dog show up for work and be excited for literally everything you can do with them, but that can also wear you down some. That frenetic energy level is great for an all day pheasant or grouse hunt, but not so much for a day stuck at home when it’s storming outside. It can also lend itself to issues with recall and steadiness, because a dog that is built to go will fight you some when you tell them they can’t go, especially if you do it in a situation where they’re highly excited and really want to go. Now. You might think, I’ve never seen an English cocker that would slow down and truly listen, so you might assume that’s beyond your dog’s reach. That’s using the general trade of a breed as an excuse to not train in good behaviors. Again, if you get a dog that is wired pretty hot, you have to do extra work to get them to throttle down. But you can get them to throttle down, and you should try, because getting a handle on a bird dog is MOOI importante. I guess an easier way to frame this up is to take a huge step back and think about working dogs in general. I have a really good buddy who is a canine officer here in the Twin Cities who has a Belgian Malanoir that is, by all accounts a true fur missile. The dog’s name is Gus and he has drive four days. He also has had the training to bring out his most Belgian Malanoa traits, and he is perfect for the job of taking down bad guys and then sniffing out all the illegal things they ditch while trying to run away. I also know a woman who has a Belgian Malanoir that is the biggest chicken shit I’ve ever met in a dog. It’s racked with nervous energy and in some ways is one of the most annoying dogs I’ve ever met because she can’t not be in constant contact with humans. I think you could train that dog for a thousand years to do basically work and it would never quite get there. Now, if you looked at the two, you wouldn’t be able to see a real difference. Esthetically, they represent the breed equally well, but internally they are as opposite as dogs could be. What does this mean for most of us, Well, if you go to get a new hunting dog and you decide I’m going to get a German short hair because I don’t know they are hunting dogs, I’d say, well, which one are you going to get? Which one are you talking about? Generally they are pretty solid when it comes to taking to anything bird related because of the breed, But the individual is what matters. You might be able to get every GSP on the planet interested in a pile of feathers to some degree, but getting one that will hunt all day and point like it’s set in stone is a different thing. So what’s the takeaway here, besides once again how important the best blood is. It’s that you have to acknowledge two things about your dog, especially when it comes to preseason training and then actual hunting, which is what we’re dealing with right now with our dogs. The first is that your dog is a specific breed, which comes with specific traits and expectations and behavioral realities. The second is that your dog is also an individual, which means it’s gonna have some quirks, it’s gonna have its own ideas and what to do for you, and its own set of internal drivers that you have to figure out as you go. What this means is that if you’re fighting something within your dog, maybe that’s just an off switch at home or whatever. Ask yourself what you’re dealing with. Is that GSP you own that won’t throttle down at home a problem just because it’s a GSP and they are generally high drive. That’s a good excuse to you. But is it entirely true in your specific scenario, or is it because your dog is a well bred GSP and it gets one walk in the morning and one walk in the afternoon. Because just walking with a dog like that will do almost nothing to take the edge off. That’s a dog that needs to run for real and work for real. How about your lab that won’t stop whining and barking every time you train. In this case, you might think that they aren’t overly known for being super vocal, but they certainly can be. Maybe just got allowed one and that’s what he is as an individual, and there’s nothing you can do about it, maybe short of a bark collar. Or once again, maybe he’s just an individual dog that needs to get in more reps every day. Otherwise he’s in a state of constant nervous excitement, which manifests itself in a bit of overload when he finally gets to do what he needs to do after being created all day. Maybe your dog will point or flush birds like a champion, but won’t pick them up once you knock them down. Is that your dog’s breed peeking through or is it up to the individual? Is that behavior that should be dismissed and just accepted as an individual quirk? Or is there something you did wrong training wise that caused him to never really get the spark necessary to pick anything up, at least anything with feathers and hold it until you can take it from him. What can you do about that? I guess the final takeaway from this one is that we choose our breeds for a specific reas. We like their looks, we like their personalities, their hunting styles, their goofiness at home, whatever. We know that they generally have the capability to do certain things really well, and that’s maybe the biggest selling point. But we also know their individuals and when they don’t do what we expect them to, we can go a lot of different ways with it, but mostly we should acknowledge that they are probably capable of the tasks or behaviors that we want them to do, we just can’t seem to get them there in that moment. This is where pro dog trainers tend to earn their money because they don’t have a choice but to try to get the most out of every dog, regardless of blood or how they’ve been handled before showing up at their kennel. There is a dance here between the breed and the specific dog, and pro trainers will default to belief that the individual is capable of a hell of a lot, and they’ll lean in that direction with their knowledge of the breed riding shotgun in their brains. Amateur handlers, of which we all are, often go the other way and dismisbehaviors we know our dogs should be a to do or offer us because we don’t know how to coax them out correctly. It’s kind of like being a parent and deciding your child shouldn’t do math because the first lessons on adding and subtracting just didn’t stick in early elementary school. Sure, maybe you have a child that is more into words, but that’s not a great excuse to not work on the fundamentals of math at such a formative age. We do this with our dogs throughout their lives, but it comes with a cost that might not show up till a few years down the line. That’s dangerous territory and it often stems from us not quite understanding what our dogs really are and what they can be with the right guidance. So think about that, you know, this fall, this preseason. You know, maybe as you’re heading out to hunt the first doves or ducks or grouse or whatever in the early season, think about that about your dog, think about your training style with them, and if you do get out there for some early season bird hunting, good luck and stay safe. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson in this This has been the Houndation’s podcast. As always, thank you so much for showing up and for listening. Cal and I here really appreciate it. How the whole Mediator crew does. If you need some more hunting content, or maybe just need something to entertain yourself, you can head to the mediater dot com. We have new articles, tons of stories of news happening in the outdoor world. We have some great writers covering like really relevant events. We have new films dropping all the time. The whole crew is putting out tons of content, and of course we have a lot of other podcasts. I know you know about the Mediater podcast, but have you ever listened to Brent Reeves This Country Life and just heard his voice That guy was meant to do that. Go give it a listen, Go check out the mediater dot com and thank you once again, how Man
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