(Question) How about giving us--the shoe-leather foot hunters who don’t have big training areas, paid-for hunting grounds and money for all the mechanical gadgets you pro dog trainers get for free and you writers try to sell--some real solid advice? I’m tired of reading tips and cures and mechanical answers for hunting dog training. Give us a few bones with meat on them. Can you? (Ohio)

(Answer) I hope so. Despite being splattered with at least a few shot from the pattern fringe of the double-barreled blast directed my way, my sympathies are largely with you. I would have to plead no contest to crimes committed. But I don’t believe a mea culpa is necessary. I hope under a law that considers mitigating circumstances you can class my offenses as misdemeanors.

Doing a random check of carbons kept to try to get an idea of how often I misbehave, I ran across one whose original had been lost during magazine ownership changes. I’m hoping it not only exonerates me of your charges, but offers you some basic dog training percepts that don’t require gadgets, grounds and gold. As far as I know, my “positive rules” appeared first in one of my early books about 45 years ago and the observations by my son, Mike, a generation later.

Specifics are a professional gun dog trainer’s bread and butter. Thus, we are inclined to dwell on them at great lengths. In emphasizing problems, what caused them and the techniques available to correct them, we often ignore generalities that should precede the specifics.

Why, how and what to do when training a hunting dog are most operable within a framework of general rules; a philosophy that outlines an overall approach to getting the job done.

Those who read the stuff my typewriter has been turning out (in an effort to help sportsmen develop pleasurable sporting dogs since the 1940s) know I deal mostly with specifics, practically and pragmatically. But more than a touch of theory or philosophy lies behind that. Therefore, I offer you seven positive rules that apply to ALL dogs, be they retrievers, flushers, pointers, trailers or couch potatoes:

1. Tell your dog. Don’t ask him
2. Be consistent.
3. Give a command only when you are prepared to enforce it.
4. Punish only when your dog understands what the punishment is for.
5. But DO punish when your dog has learned a command but defies you.
6. Praise LAVISHLY when your dog does right.
7. Never fool your dog.

Since those rules were first published in Hunting Dog Know-How (a book on training all types of gun dogs I wrote back in 1965), in some irreverent quarters they’ve been dubbed “Duffey’s Seven Commandments.” Theology not being my bag, such was never intended. They are seven positive rules that will make it easier to apply the specific techniques by which dogs of the sporting breeds can be developed into useful gunning companions. The degree is dependent upon what ancestral genes have given each dog, plus the skill and diligence of the individual trainer.

When you TELL a dog something, snap it out incisively. There are times when you can’t help yelling at him. Go ahead and do it. If it doesn’t get his attention any better than a firm verbal command, at least it will make you feel better and your dog won’t be confused…as he will be if you ask or beg him to do something. He may think your softly delivered entreaty is praise for disobedience.