However, it is important to not lose sight of the fact that the market hunters on Chesapeake Bay originally developed the breed. Not only were the dogs expected to make 150 to 200 retrieves a day from the rough, icy waters of the Bay, but they were expected to guard the hunter's boat and equipment at night. The old-time watermen ruthlessly culled dogs that did not meet those strict standards. As a consequence, most Chesapeakes still retain some of that guard-dog mentality.

The breed also has gradually grown more amenable to training than it was 45 years ago. You could absolutely pound the snot out of my early Chesapeakes and they would shrug it off like nothing happened. This is no longer true. If you are heavy-handed with most modern Chesapeakes, they will tell you, "Fetch your own damn ducks"…and you have never experienced stubborn defiance until you have had a Chesapeake dig in its heels with you. The Chesapeake's personality simply will not let them surrender to physical abuse. But physical abuse will cause them to abandon their innate loyalty and desire to please you.

Despite their enormous physical strength and outward hardiness, most Chesapeakes today are pretty soft dogs when it comes to training. A wise old trainer I knew who had considerable success with the breed summed up Chesapeake training very succinctly. He said, "Chesapeakes aren't so tough. You just have to persuade them that what you want them to do is their idea and you can't push them around because they will push back."

The breed remains the premier waterfowl hunter's dog. No other retriever breed can handle the cold, the rough going or the vagaries of wounded waterfowl quite as well as a Chesapeake. They possess a superb coat for their work that ranges in color from the deepest chocolate to a magnificent red-gold, called "sedge" in the breed standard, to light straw, but all the acceptable colors provide camouflage in their working environment.

They have outstanding marking ability and have a phenomenal ability to remember marks. They enter the coldest water with a kind of joy that is a sight to behold. I have seen Chesapeakes shrug off weather and water conditions that would send other retriever breeds running for the protection of a heated pickup cab. They are absolutely without peer when it comes to instinctively knowing where to find crippled waterfowl.

Without any formal training they will dive after cripples, diving until they ultimately wear the bird down to the point where they can catch it. They seem to take the loss of a crippled bird as a personal insult. They are big enough and strong enough to go to the mat with a wing-tipped Canada goose but gentle enough to return fledgling songbirds intact and uninjured.

Chesapeake breeders have avoided, for the most part, the temptation to produce the kind of hot-wired temperaments that win field trials but are nearly impossible to live with in a duck blind. Most Chesapeakes are great companions in the blind or the boat, alert and raring to go when there are birds in the air but calm and pleasant during the inevitable lulls. It is unlikely, however, that you will ever be successful in convincing them that at least half your lunch and all the meatloaf sandwiches do not belong to them.

While primarily waterfowl dogs, Chesapeakes also excel at hunting upland birds. It is certainly not as much fun to hunt quail and pheasants over a Chesapeake as it is to hunt those birds over a pointing dog but in the last 10 years, my hunting partners and I have killed many more pheasants and at least as many quail over the Chessies as we have over the pointing dogs.

Chesapeakes are wonderful dogs but only for people who are willing to accept them as they are. Just as you would be unlikely to create anything positive by changing a note of Mozart's or a brush stroke on the Mona Lisa or a word of Hamlet, you do not improve Chesapeakes by trying to change them into something they are not. For those folks who love and appreciate them for what they are, no changes are needed.