As a general rule, hunting a young dog with an older dog won't teach it to hunt. The dog needs to learn to hunt on its own.

When the guy found out I was training dogs on the side, he gave me a call. Could I handle a problem his dog was having? Since I work with just a couple of dogs each summer, I was already booked, but I told him I'd be happy to talk if he wanted to drive out for visit. He showed up right on schedule.

As it turned out, his dog's problem wasn't much of an issue, and in a few minutes we got into a rambling conversation about bird dogs and hunting. I'll talk dogs and hunting with anybody--just try to shut me up--and it was obvious this guy knew the game. A half hour later, he sighed. There was something else. His older dog was on the way out, he let on, and wouldn't be able to "train" his new puppy to hunt.

I must have seemed dubious, so he explained himself. Seems his dad had raised German shorthairs for years, and new pups had always been run in the field behind his older dogs, learning to hunt in the process.

I'm a little brighter than I look (although that will undoubtedly amaze some of you), so I bit my tongue. But I couldn't help thinking, where was your dad's GSP when I needed my last dog trained?

Actually, that's not what I thought. I've seen dogs learn to raid garbage cans, bark for hours on end, and crap on the bed, all, I assume, by watching other dogs get away with that type of behavior, but I've yet to see a dog learn to find birds, hunt to objectives, point, back, retrieve, come when called, whoa, heel or do anything else constructive from hunting with other dogs. It's a nice fantasy, but it just doesn't work that way.

On the other hand, occasionally running a younger dog with an experienced older dog can have some benefits, especially if it's limited to a few days at the beginning of the season. The older dog will find the birds, and in the process the youngster begins associating certain types of cover with bird scent. But at that point it's time to let the pup hunt by himself.

He needs to develop the drive to hunt on his own, and keeping him in the field with an older dog runs the risk of making him dependent upon the other animal. If a youngster shows me drive and initiative on his own, I typically won't hunt him with an older dog at all until his second season.

Still, it's an enduring myth--that a pup will learn to hunt by hunting with an older dog--and it persists even among experienced hunters, like the guy I was talking to that day in my living room.

And so it goes. I'm not sure how these ideas got started, but I suspect it has something to do with how much we invest in believing they're true. As with politics and religion, what you believe often determines how you interpret the world. But wait, it's a bit subtler than that--some of these myths have a grain of truth.