Done correctly, force breaking won't lessen your dog's enthusiasm to retrieve.

On the other hand, there's one thing that force breaking won't do, in my limited experience: cure hardmouth. I can't tell you how it works with retrievers, but pointing dogs with this problem are fairly common; I've owned a couple myself, including my youngest setter, Hanna. So far, force breaking hasn't helped Hanna and it didn't help the other one, either.

I don't have a broad base of experience with this, however, although most of the claims I've heard otherwise come not from pointing dog trainers, but from retriever trainers, in whose dogs hardmouth is apparently less common. In point of fact, I haven't found a solution. I've tried frozen birds, a leather harness with steel spikes (on a pigeon, not me), nicks from a shock collar, verbal reprimands, you name it.

About the only thing I've found that occasionally seems to work is to be standing next to the dog when it picks up a wounded bird, making sure it doesn't chew it, but that has proved difficult to do on any kind of consistent basis. So for the time being I'm still searching for a technique. You'll hear when I get it figured out.

I suspect the inclination toward hardmouth is something a dog is born with or later learns on his own, not necessarily something you create inadvertently through training. Chomping down on a struggling game bird is a natural reaction among pointing dogs; if he chomps down hard enough he kills the bird and, at least from his perspective, solves the problem.

Like almost everyone, I spent years believing that playing tug-of-war with a dog would develop hardmouth problems later on, but now I'm not so sure. Throw a towel into a pen full of puppies and you'll have a couple of them playing tug-of-war in two minutes or less. Do they develop a hard mouth because of that behavior? Maybe, maybe not.

I also know at least one retriever trainer who deliberately plays tug-of-war when his dogs return a bumper he's thrown. He thinks it encourages them to return the bumper to hand, and he may be on to something. I've hunted over his dogs and none have hardmouth problems that I can see.

How many of you have been told that pointing dogs should be taught to quarter? One of the goals of my life, along with shooting a perfect score at my sporting clays club, dancing like Gene Kelly, and keeping my preternaturally good looks until I'm 100, is to convince people that pointing dogs don't need to quarter. Spaniels, retrievers…they quarter, but good pointing dogs hunt to objectives, which they'll do all by their happy little selves if you get out of the way and let them.

That means they'll learn where the birds live through the process of trial and error, not through some mechanical windshield-wiper pattern you've drilled into them. If you so desire, you can direct them to better cover by whistling to get their attention, then walking toward the cover with your arm out and pointing in that direction. I do just that with my own dogs.