That was precisely what I did not want to do. It meant chucking several weeks of hard-won progress and giving up on the smooth, seamless transition from dummies to birds I’d envisioned. Worse, it meant adding an indeterminate amount of time to the whole process. Force-fetching is a long, muddy slog to begin with, and now I had to start all over? But there was no way around it; on the next session I’d return Juno to the bench.

And that’s when my Irish luck revived. Juno had already been through bench work; within a day or two he was back on the ground picking up dummies I’d placed a few feet in front of him. Shortly after that he was in the yard retrieving thrown dummies, then dead birds, and finally flying, shot pigeons. It took only about a week and a half to get him back to where he’d been before and with minor lapses he’s been an enthusiastic retriever of dummies and shot pigeons ever since.

So why had he balked? Had I pushed him too hard? Beats the hell out of me. But I do know this: for whatever reason, I was moving too fast. When I slowed down and gave him a breather, he responded and came along nicely--at his own deliberate pace. All I had to do was muster the patience to allow him to do that.

I’m not a believer in shortcuts and quick fixes. There’s no way you can push a dog through 12 months of training in three months and not incur penalties for such rash optimism. There’s a simple reason for this: The speed at which dogs are capable of learning and the speed at which they actually absorb the lesson are weeks and sometimes months apart.

Here’s a simple example: Most dogs grasp the concept of the command “sit” in a few days, sometimes in a few lessons. But will that dog sit at a distance? When he’s excited? When he’s got any of a million other canine concerns occupying his mind? He knows what “sit” means, but it hasn’t yet become a conditioned response, which takes…as long as it takes. But if we’ve got a bird season coming up, and our dog isn’t quite where we want him, it’s extremely tempting to exit the program--sit, come, whoa, whatever--the moment we think the dog has “got it.” How do I know this? Ha.

Sticking with the game plan and having the patience to see it to fruition are what trains dogs, not demanding that training progress on an arbitrary timeline. And so it goes in the field. Most dogs are puppies (or puppy like) until they’re around two, which is why most pointing dogs don’t really hit their stride until they’re three or four years of age. It is miles in the field, not necessarily the extent of the dog’s training, that will get him there.

I’m certainly not suggesting that training take a back seat to hunting, only that a dog needs lots of hunting to fully absorb what he’s learned in the yard and apply it effectively in the field. As most dogs mature, they settle down, are more receptive to doing things your way, and in general start figuring out that playing for your team isn’t such a radical idea after all. In that regard, Hanna, my youngest setter, seems to be right on schedule.

Hanna was well schooled in the basics by the end of last summer: kennel, whoa, come, fetch, and steady to wing and shot. However, I chose not to work on her backing; at the time, she had enough on her plate. I was also hoping that she’d learn to back on her own. Many dogs do.

Not Hanna, though. So about halfway through last season, I introduced her to backing a pointed dog in my yard and then began reinforcing it in the field.