5. ALWAYS QUIT BEFORE YOUR DOG LOSES INTEREST. This goes right along with reading your dog. Keep things short and sweet. You want to quit while he still wants to do more.

6. ANTICIPATE DISOBEDIENCE OR MISTAKES AND BE PREPARED TO ACT. Timing is very critical to successful dog training and sometimes a reaction is too late.

7. SOFTER DOGS NEED MORE ENCOURAGEMENT, PATIENCE AND TIME. Ideally, your personalities should be similar. If they are not, you may need to adapt your personality to the dog.

8. DON’T BE AFRAID TO MAKE MISTAKES! Get out with your dog and enjoy the process together.

It’s a nice feeling for a father to find himself in agreement with his son’s opinions and I couldn’t agree more if I’d written those guidelines myself…and maybe over past years, I have written something similar. It would be nice to know that something worthwhile rubbed off on the kid.

For both Mike and I know that in the art of dog training, only a few arrogant imbeciles would lay claim to “originating” an operating rule or a technique. Dogs and dog trainers have been around for as long as jokes and comedians. We all learn from others, past and present. Just when we think that through hands-on experience we’ve made a discovery or originated a break-through, along comes another trainer who says, “Oh, yeah! That really works. I’ve been doing that since old Bill Smith showed me how when I was a kid.”

Achieving success as a gun dog trainer and recognition as an authoritative writer about the subject doesn’t put a man on monetary easy street. Quite the contrary; it costs time and money to learn canine characteristics firsthand through daily contact, care, training, hunting, investigating and discussions with thousands of other fascinated men and women who know more, as much or less about the subject than you.

But for me, it’s been a hard to beat lifestyle. I hope that Mike will also come to know that the greatest satisfaction derived from the effort comes from the knowledge, or at least the belief, that through publication of what we’ve learned and earned we’ve been able to explain the necessities of what goes into understanding, caring for and training the gun dogs that thousands of sportsmen take afield each hunting season.