Steadying your gun dog to flush will help ensure the dog's safety. Here, the trainer practices the whoa command with his dog on a whoa board, a check cord snubbed to a stake and an e-collar for additional reinforcement.

Among we who ponder these issues, the discussions between those who favor training their dogs to be steady to wing, shot and fall and those who prefer to do none of those things are endless, occasionally heated and rarely concluded to anyone's satisfaction.

In camp one, you have the guys who want a finished dog, a dog that won't budge until given the command to do so. Among hunters, the rationale is that a steady dog can better mark falls and won't put up birds down range. I like my dogs as steady as I can get them, but I don't completely buy into any of the reasons I just outlined.

In camp two are the vast majority of bird hunters who have never steadied their dogs, see no reason for doing so, and aren't particularly interested in changing. Many have never hunted over or even seen a dog that is steady to wing and shot. They claim that a dog that breaks at the flush is quicker to the retrieve. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but

I'm not completely buying that argument, either.

However, both camps do agree on this: a dog that breaks at the flush can endanger himself if he runs into the path of a shot string.

Tossing a clip-wing pigeon is a sure way to tempt the dog to break

In case that has never happened to you, allow me to explain how it works. We'll use the hypothetical example of a widely experienced bird hunter and dog trainer who happens to write about pointing dogs for a nationally known outdoor magazine. To protect him from the well deserved embarrassment his stupidity caused him, we'll give him an assumed name. Let's see…okay, I've got it. We'll call him Dave.

Once upon a time, Dave and a friend were hunting blue grouse. Dave's friend was the man who had hired him to train his English setter that very summer, and this was one of that dog's first hunts. After two hours of fruitless searching, the dog finally stuck a pair of grouse, and Dave walked in for the flush. One bird got up, which Dave killed.

The dog remained steady as trained, and Dave was very proud of the work he'd done. He nodded to his friend, who released his dog, but at that moment, the second bird flushed, which got up directly in front of the now running dog. Dave raised his gun and shot twice -- safely, as it turned out -- but much, much too close to the setter for comfort. Horrified at the mistake he'd made, Dave felt like breaking his extremely pricey side-by-side over his own head.

So. How do you keep your dog safe without going through the considerable time and effort it takes to steady them to wing, shot and fall? The answer is to take the middle way -- steady the dog to flush only. This will still take time and effort, to be sure, but steadying a dog to flush is less work than steadying them all the way through, and much easier to maintain in the field.