Retrievers are usually better than pointing dogs at both marking and recovering downed game. Photo by Dave Carty.

Years ago, when I owned a spaniel and hunted over mine and others frequently, I rarely lost shot birds no matter how lightly they were hit. I was an even worse shot then than I am now (that may be hard for some of my friends to believe, but there you go), but it mattered little to my plucky springer; he was just as happy fetching birds as he was rousting them out of the grass. His diligence made all the difference.

I doubt if his nose was any better than the noses on the setters and Brittanys I’ve owned since then, but his drive to retrieve made all the difference. He’d search an area endlessly, puzzling out stale scent until he finally found the bird, even if it took half an hour. Hunting with a friend and his springers a couple years ago, I remember watching in amazement as one of his dogs chased down a ringneck I’d wing tipped, the hyperkinetic little dog scrambling all over several acres of dense brush, deadfalls, and weeds, until she finally nabbed the bird in a free-for-all under a deadfall. I’d forgotten just how good spaniels could be.

More recently, I’ve spent some time with another friend (and a lot better shot than me, thank God) who literally owns some of the top competitive springers in the country–high point Canadian and American champions. We pair his spaniels with my pointers and hunt them together…and again, rarely if ever lose a bird (I’ll be writing more about that approach in an upcoming issue).

But most pointing dogs, with the possible exception of the wirehaired versatile breeds and the odd GSP, would rather hunt than fetch birds, and simply will never have the chops of a spaniel, much less a Labrador. Certainly there are exceptions; the pointer or setter or Brit who will spend a half hour puzzling out a lukewarm trail, but those dogs, at least in my experience, are rare and wonderful exceptions.

Knowing all this, it might be tempting to give up on making a decent fetcher out of your pointing dog. Why put up with substandard retrieving? My answer to that is that any kind of retrieve is better than nothing, and the best way to turn a non-retrieving pointer into a reliable retriever is to force break him.

Force breaking is a difficult process, and I’m not going to go into the specifics today. It is also a technique that has engendered more than its share of myths, foremost among them the notion that force breaking a dog will somehow “ruin” his desire to retrieve.

In my experience, I’ve never force broken a dog of my own or for someone else that hasn’t emerged with more desire to retrieve than it had going in. There’s a tipping point in the process where the dog can go either way, and many people, I suspect, give up just when a few more days of training would have brought their dog around.

It also says something that almost every pro retriever trainer in the country force breaks his Labs and/or Chessies, which are the hardest driving natural retrievers in the world. (To be fair, though, most spaniel trainers don’t force break their dogs.) Many of these guys train more dogs in a month than I’ll train in a lifetime, and if it’s good enough for them, it’s plenty good enough for me.