Breaking can be anything from a show-stopper to a ho-hummer, depending on when it happens and how you feel about it.

The smart money is betting that before this hunting season is over, you (as "Every-Hunter") will find yourself in a dilemma about how to deal with a training problem your dog (as "Every-Retriever") will present you with. Should you ignore it? Should you mix a little training in with your hunting right away? Should you wait until after hunting season to cure it? Or should you stop hunting your dog while you cure the problem?

If you're looking for pat generic answers, you won't look long before you discover that they don't exist. To some degree, each training problem that comes up while hunting is its own puzzlement, its own predicament.

How They Happen
Unfortunately, no retriever bright enough to know the difference between Fetch and Give would ever mistake hunting for training. From the canine point of view, several significant differences are glaringly obvious: the weather, the location, the crate time, the level of activity, and most of all, the boss' attitude and general deportment.

"In training," Every-Retriever muses, "the boss focuses almost entirely on moi, and he does everything so consistently and precisely. But while hunting, he hardly notices me, and he vacillates between semi-consciousness and wild excitement. Hmmm, if the rules are different for him, they must also be different for me."

Thus does Every-Retriever begin taking liberties while hunting. And Every-Hunter, in his mental ecstasy, at first fails to notice anything different, then overlooks it for a while, but finally begins to get upset. Then he must decide in which of the four above named ways he should deal with the problem.

Which he should choose depends on several factors: his own values, his retriever's age and temperament, and the nature of the problem. Let's look at these one at a time.

Your Values
If you're a dedicated field trialer or hunt tester, you shouldn't let your retriever get away with anything while hunting that he couldn't get away with under judgment. Period. Case closed. This means that, even while hunting, you'll be more focused on training than on shooting birds. Ideally, you should have a buddy along to do most of the shooting.

Some serious dog-gamers keep a second retriever, frequently an old "retiree," around for more carefree hunting.

If you're a casual dog-gamer--I've never known one, but rumors of their existence persist--you'll have some judgment calls to make. If you're too demanding, hunting won't be much fun. If you're too lenient, your kindness will almost certainly come back to haunt you next spring in your dog-game of choice. You, too, could benefit from a second retriever, just for hunting.

If you have no dog-game ambitions, you only need to please yourself and your hunting buddies. So, except for a few very serious problems that must be addressed immediately (see below), you're free to deal with canine misbehaviors however you wish.

If your retriever errs in ways that neither upset you nor spoil the hunt for anyone else, you can ignore it, or perhaps put the correction off until after hunting season. If he does something that particularly offends your sense of proper canine deportment, even though others may think it trivial, you're free to stop the show and correct him immediately.