The road that I took into dog training was one littered with both ignorance and cultural hype. Looking back it seems foolish to have thought about the things that I did, but without them I would have never discovered the joys and headaches that come with training your dog for such a complicated job. I had just moved up north to the great state of Wisconsin for my job. I had no internet and no cable tv. What I did have though, was a DVD player and the local library. Before I moved to Wisconsin I had just recently started watching the cultural phenomenon that was Duck Dynasty. My local library had the complete series and with nothing better to do I watched them all in my spare time. Add to that the fact that a boy from rural Indiana, with very little waterfowl around, was now in a prime waterfowl location and my interest peaked.
I became more and more interested and obsessed with the idea of waterfowl hunting. I would see ducks flying over my apartment everyday. I would go to the local sporting goods shop and browse all of the decoys and calls. I would travel to the local lake and watch ducks and geese on the water and I even started consuming tons of waterfowl content via YouTube or podcasts. All of this led me to wanting to go on my first waterfowl hunt. But one question that I hadn’t yet figured out an answer to was, “How do you pick up the dead ducks from the water if you don’t have a dog?” After pondering this question and scouring the internet I came to the conclusion that you can’t hunt waterfowl without a dog. The time bomb started ticking...
Fast-forward a couple of years and the opportunity finally showed itself. I would be getting my first retriever, a golden retriever who I named Ida, from a litter of puppies that my sister-in-law was having. I had wanted to get a well bred labrador, but I couldn’t justify, let alone afford, the cost. Nevertheless, I did my due diligence and knew that this pup had a good chance of turning into a retrieving fanatic just like her mom.
During those years between deciding I wanted to get a hunting dog and actually getting one, I became obsessed with dog training. I followed numerous waterfowl dog trainers’ social media accounts, read every book I could find on the subject matter, and watched hundreds of YouTube videos multiple times. I even put some of these things I was learning into practice with my boxer Lotti (boy was she thrilled to be the test dummy). Each step I took was like a shovel full of dirt as I continued to dig myself into the hole that is waterfowl hunting and dog training. And let me tell you it didn’t take too long before I found myself in China.
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