Like all phases of training, steadying a young dog is something that shouldn’t be rushed.

I’m a pathetically Type A personality. I want everything done just so and immediately, if not sooner. After years of wrestling with this miserable curse, I’ve managed to nurture the Type B side of my persona, but “B” is still a long ways from “A” on my personal alphabet.

That has dearly cost me. Many years ago, impatient and frustrated with some pointless trifle, I slammed my fist through the rungs of a chair, which damn near broke my hand and improved the chair’s attitude not a whit. Even today, I fantasize weekly about throwing my painfully slow and constantly balking computer off a 10-story rooftop. The first couple dogs I trained bore the brunt of that misplaced zeal: they were going to learn right now…or else.

That mindset has been, with few exceptions, a complete and utter failure. When it comes to training bird dogs, you may well be in charge of dictating the schedule of events, but your dog always gets the last word on the speed at which he learns them. Pounding your head against the wall won’t hurry things along. As proof, I offer the dents in my living room wall as evidence.

The best way to get around any training-related roadblock is to stop before you make things worse, put the dog up for a day, and then try to figure out what went wrong. Sometimes, a break is all he needs, and he comes to the next session happy and willing to work. Other times, you have to go back two or three steps in the progression and start the training process all over again. Juno, one of two dogs I trained this past summer, was a case in point.

Juno was a happy-go-lucky Brittany, a stout little trooper eager to please and in love with birds. He was soft, so he would sulk from time to time if I pushed him too much for his liking, but for the most part he made it through the first half of my five-month training program in good shape.

All that changed when I introduced him to force breaking. That is not unusual, in my experience. I’ve yet to train a dog that enjoyed the force breaking process and some of them fight it violently, despite the fact that my methods (I use the traditional ear pinch) have become far less harsh over the years. Nonetheless, if a dog has it in him to put his paw down, force breaking is when he’s going to do it.

As it turned out, happy-go-lucky Juno had a mind of his own. But rather than bolt or bite, Juno simply decided, apropos of nothing as far as I could see, that he wasn’t going to pick up the dummies I threw for him anymore. He’d grant me one or two retrieves at the start of each session and then nada. I’d throw a dummy; he’d run past it and then stop and stare vacantly at the mountains as if trying to forget the whole unpleasant incident. An ear pinch would bring him around, but the next throw, next dummy, we’d go through the same song and dance all over again. At the point where he should have been getting over his aversion to retrieving and actually enjoying the process, he was becoming increasingly reluctant to retrieve at all.

When it finally dawned on me that our sessions weren’t moving him forward, I knew what I had to do: go back two or three steps and start over again.