When your dog turns two, the new puppy shine begins to wear off, and the real work begins. It’s the sophomore season where your puppy needs to mix natural ability and exposure with some manners. There’s a reason it’s not talked about more, as it’s not often glitzy, just damn hard work. The second year you’ll begin building the bridge to the next decade of fine dog work.

There have been countless articles written about a puppy’s first year, what to do and what to avoid. I get it and have been there. Few things in a bird hunter’s world are filled with more promise or excitement than adding a new member to your pack. Then comes year two, and for many, expectations muddy reality. You have a two-year-old puppy who is expected to perform, but at the same time, allowed and expected to make a ton of mistakes. Read on as we catch up with two experienced bird dog trainers to discuss how to navigate the sophomore slump.

Freshman No More  

Welcome to the quagmire of dog training, where you’re juggling success, failure, expectations, reality, ego, and temperament. That’s just you as a handler, we haven’t even brought the dog into this equation. The strain between expectations and reality will be a constant source of problems unless you open your eyes and are honest with yourself.

George Lyall of The Farm’s Prairie Wind Kennel has been training bird dogs for 25 years and spent the better part of our conversation talking about this concept. Being able to accurately assess the level your dog is at going into his or her second season will be crucial to forming your expectations. “There are three foundational elements I expect out of a dog going into year two,” said Lyall. “Those are go with me, come to me, and stand still.”

It doesn’t mean stand still on birds, but standing still next to you, or on a table. If a dog can’t stand still with no distractions, how in the world would you expect it to stand birds? If you haven’t worked on this a lot, congratulations, you’ve just filled up your summer training schedule!

Ryan Mulcahy of Born to Run Kennels harps on the importance of having a solid pattern, or the “go with me” aspect of training heading into year two. By developing this pattern, he’s creating a “forward thinking dog, and by doing so, creates less stress for them down the road.” That means when training, the only time that birds are being introduced is when the dog is patterning correctly. What does a correct pattern look like? You want a dog that is staying out to the front between 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock and hitting likely objectives. How far should my dog range? It’s a very common question, and it’s a hard one to answer. In a nutshell, set the dog’s range to what you’re comfortable with, and cue them when they’ve hit that distance. However, it’s important to balance the natural range of the dog with your expectations. If you have a field trial bred pointer, and expect them to stay within 30 yards, then I’m sorry, you’re going to have a rough go.

In addition to these foundational training elements, wild bird contacts will also have a significant bearing on what can be expected out of your dog. Lyall asks, “How many opportunities has your dog had to hunt wild birds in its first season? Because the number of contacts that pup has in its first season predicates what’s expected out of them in year two. If you compare two dogs, one who has had 300 wild bird contacts in their first year and another who has only been run on pen raised birds a handful of times, I’ll be asking different things out of those dogs.”

Unfortunately, we tend to compare our dogs to another. It often is one who may have had significantly more experience and expect them to perform at the same level. Our natural tendency is to compare dogs who are the same age, but this can be detrimental to your mindset as a trainer. What happens when buddy Bill and his dog Fido are making faster progress than you? The odds are good you’ll try to rush the process so you can catch up, and in turn rob the dog of the building blocks needed to proceed. The same thing can happen on the opposite side of the equation, and while it can feel good as a handler, it can have a relaxing impact on the training process.

George Lyall said a similar problem is taking the success you’ve seen in the dog and wanting to amplify it. “It’s the notion of ‘Well, if the dog did “so and so” thing in the first year, then I expect it to be twice as good in year two’, and that’s simply not how it works. It’s these types of thoughts that proliferate the strain between expectations and reality.”

Sophomore Season Expectations  

Mulcahy says there are two major objectives he’s looking to achieve. The first is being able to get the dog stopping to the flush. Before your dog can stop on birds...let’s circle back to the earlier discussion about standing still. The dog needs to be able to stand still! Do I need to say it again? You as the handler need to be able to get the dog to reliably stop. I won’t go into the argument about which way is better, but incessantly yelling “whoa” is not the way to do it.

The second objective is getting the dog to begin working with a purpose. What does “working with a purpose mean” and how do you achieve it? We touched earlier on how Ryan is only getting young dogs into birds when they are patterning correctly. This is one of the foundational elements to getting your dog into the zone. Being able to stop your dog at a distance is again, important. If you notice the dog zipping around with no agenda or purpose. Stop them! A dog with calm feet has a calm mind. Dogs will get whipped up into froth, and you will see them “lose their mind.” By stopping them and letting them gain their composure, it’s often like hitting a reset button.

There are a few very common pitfalls when it comes to training and handling a dog in its second season. For most of us, we have bird dogs to hunt birds. But being focused on shooting birds during this period will hamper the future success of your dog. This is one of the most crucial times for developing a finished bird dog. You as a handler and trainer need to exhibit the patience to concentrate on training your dog, and not shooting birds. “It’s your dog, whatever you want to put into it is what you’ll get. It doesn’t matter what level you want to achieve, but if you want a truly great dog, this part really matters.” Lyall says. Mulcahy echoes this sentiment and will often team up with another hunter and have them shoot, while he works on handling. He observes many hunters relax during a dog’s second season and let them get away with sloppy work. This poses problems down the road as you’ve continuously engrained into the dog that it’s okay to be sloppy. You’ll then need to put more pressure on the dog to break that bad habit, and a lot of dogs won’t be able mentally handle it.

Don’t let this put you in vapor lock! Or vice versa and decide to rule with an iron fist. Training a dog is a delicate dance, an art, and less of a science. Don’t be so afraid your dog is going to mess up, that you’re depriving them of learning opportunities. Here’s a great example: Your dog goes on point 100 yards away for the first time of the day. You’d really like to shoot whatever is at the business end of his nose, as the pup has ripped through most other opportunities so far on the trip. So, what do you do as the dog begins to creep into the bird? You reach for the remote and give them a light stimulation to stop. The problem: You’ve just robbed that dog of an excellent teachable moment.

If you wouldn’t have stimulated the dog, it probably would have crashed in, and the birds would have flown with dog in tow. Then you could have slowly rolled it to a stop. The dog’s thought process would now be “dang, I busted in there and the birds went away. I should have just stood there.” You want the dog to learn by making the decision, right or wrong. You won’t always be within eyesight to stop them from creeping, they have to learn to stop doing that themselves. “Once you start taking creep,” says Lyall. “You’ll have to do it for the rest of the dog’s life.”

Another pitfall that’s often encountered is a handler’s resistance to taking a step back in their training process. “You need to expect, be willing and acknowledge that you’re going to have to take a step back” says Lyall. Going backwards must be against human nature, and after something has been supposedly achieved, it can be a blow to your ego to have to step back. But it shouldn’t, this is completely normal and beneficial, as it ensures your dog has a solid building block to move forward on.

The sophomore season and the training that goes into it can be really intimidating. Things will go wrong! There’s no way around it. “Many times, it’s going to be human error, and that can be very frustrating” says Lyall. The best thing you can do in one of these situations is to not react or turn what could be a negative situation into a positive one. When the rubber meets the road, it’s going to be your attitude that often will make the difference when training a gun dog. The sophomore season is a fun one, as you get to see much of the future character and potential of your dog come out. Now it’s your job to foster and steer that potential.