Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and this week's show is all about having
more than one dog and how that can be a
benefit but can also create some unexpected problems. Since we
are Minnesotan's my family, you know, through and through we
have a strong lake cabin culture. So many people we
(00:25):
know go up north for the weekend or for their
vacation to chill out next to some lake that offers
up fishing and swimming and generally pretty good vibes. We
are lucky in my family to have a little place
at a lake, and questionably lucky that about fifty seven
of my wife's relatives also have places at the same
lake in the same exact spot. Many of them have dogs,
(00:46):
so there is always a rotating cast of hounds up
at the lake. And the number of times that I
hear someone comment on how old dogs teach new dogs
this skill or that trick is kind of mind blowing.
It's also generally totally wrong, which is one of the
things I'm going to get into right now.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Beliefs are weird.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
On one hand, they can carry a lot of weight
and truly help people make better decisions. On the other hand,
they can convince us to dig in our heels and
tighten our grip on things that simply are not true.
The history of us is littered with those types of beliefs.
It wasn't so long ago that it was believed that
(01:32):
the shapier skull would determine your strengths, the depths of
your mental faculties, and whether you were likely to be,
I don't know, a serial killer or not. Phrenology as
a belief eventually went the way of the Dodo, but
not nearly as quickly or as quietly as it should have.
Another theory about how our brains work, proposed by John
Locke back in the late sixteen hundreds, said that we
(01:55):
were all born as blank slates. There was nothing written
on our mental chalkboard, so to speak, and we all
had to gain our knowledge from lived experiences and our
perception of the world once we were in it. We
now know that there's plenty of writing on that chalkboard
that has passed down through generations, and that we most
certainly aren't born as blank slates. Einstein, that fellow who
(02:19):
changed an awful lot about what we understand in the
world of physics once proposed that the universe was stationary.
Since he was the kind of guy to get the
tough questions right, people believed him until Edwin Hubble discovered
that everywhere we look in the night sky, objects were
red shifted, meaning that they were going away from us
at a rate that was hard to fathom. It also
(02:42):
proved that the universe wasn't static but is actually expanding.
For about thirty years ending in the nineteen nineties, people
believed that sharks would provide the cure for cancer and humans.
This is because people believe that sharks never got cancer,
which has been proven wrong dozens and dozens of times now.
Another belief in the sixties that was totally bonkers was
(03:06):
that teens who went on dates had to do some
type of activity so they wouldn't succumb to their desires
to well get busy. I guess they were supposed to
play rugby or build a small off the grid cabin
on their dates so they wouldn't suddenly realize that there
were all their fun things they could do. People are nuts,
and it's fun to look back on some of the
dumb stuff that society generally believed. It's also true that
(03:29):
folks fifty or one hundred years down the road will
look back at us like we are cave men and
women just barely functioning with our dumb, primitive brains and
our outdated and dangerous ideas. They might get a kick
out of the flat earthers, who should just charter a
plane and go find the edge of the earth so
we can end this debate once and for all. We
(03:50):
are all waiting there. Fliffers, go out and find it.
Take some pictures. Can't be too hard, right, any huski.
The dog world isn't immune to beliefs that just don't
hold a lot of water. And one of them that
I'm going to get into right now is the idea
that old dogs teach puppies the ways of the world.
(04:11):
Is if your old lab takes the new pop aside,
a puppy that the old dog undoubtedly hates and resents
with as much hate and resentment as a lab can muster,
which isn't much, and that dog's going to say to
that puppy, this is how we sit. So we get
a bite of cheese or a treat, or the roosters
(04:31):
like to hold up in the patches of willows on
the edge of the cattaills, so just swing down when
young grasshopper and get ready to flush them. Let me
frame this up another way to maybe make it make
more sense. If you want your dog trained and you
aren't confident enough to do it yourself or capable enough
to do it yourself, where do you look right a
(04:53):
professional dog trainer? You don't look for someone who owns
a really good dog that will train your dog. It's
not like there is a market for professional trainers who
just let their dogs train other dogs while they sit
on the porch of their vacation homes, drinking margaritas and
checking their ever increasing bank balances. If it was as
simple as old dogs teaching young dogs, you can bet
(05:15):
your happy ass that someone would have capitalized on that
in some way already, because there would be some serious
money to be made.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Now.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
While there's probably are some folks somewhere who claim to
do this, you know, this world's pretty big. It's not
an industry that is thriving, at least to my knowledge.
I'm pretty sure I know why, and so do you.
So Anyway, I currently have two dogs, and one of
them is eleven and the other is three. I wouldn't
say the veteran hasn't taught the rookie anything because she has.
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For instance, the old dog is a master of finding
any molecule of food she can, which often involves her
licking the stove and the entire kitchen floor on the
off chance that three breadcrumbs or a splatter of buck
has ended up within her reach. The young dog has
taken to this task several times a day as well,
which might be proof that dogs do teach other dogs something.
(06:09):
It also might be proof of parallel thinking in food
driven animals with unbelievable noses. It's hard to say, and
I can't really ask them. I think it's far more
likely that the new dog learning from the old dog.
Belief is really supported by how the old dogs work
with us, not how they work with the puppies. For example,
during pheasant hunts, an old dog is not going to
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tolerate a puppy in its personal space. A good bird
dog is going to do what good bird dogs do.
And if there is something that old bird dogs love,
it's bird hunting. A pop out in the field for
its first fall might have a tiny inkling in its
mostly empty skull that birds are what it's after, but
it won't be mission focused like an older dog. It'll
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be very excited to be there, and it will burn
an awful lot of unnecessary energy just running around sniffing stuff,
which is great. But when the old dog puts up
a rooster and the shotgun swings just right, the puppy
might realize that the entire vibe of this new outing
has changed. When the old dog picks up that Chinese
chicken and brings it back to you, that puppy is
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going to be very interested in it. It's also going
to notice that everyone is happy about the new developments.
And if there is a sense memory that grows deep
roots in a dog's brain, it'll involve attaching the scent
of something to an exciting fun experience. Add in a
dash of gene deep love for game birds, and you
have the recipe for the advancement of a dog's education
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in the realm of bird hunting. In that case, did
the old dog explicitly teach the new dog anything? Nope,
I take that back. The veteran might have taught the pupster,
through a growl or some other avoidance behavior, that every
rooster is his. And that's the final word. On the matter,
there's no denying the benefit of bird exposure and the
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overall inns and outs of the hunt that just go
way better when you have a dog along that knows
what to do. A puppy or a youngster in that
world is going to learn more about the hunt than
one that goes solo and has less exposure to birds
and gunshots.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
And the whole process.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Another example here, which I talked about recently on an episode,
just might involve water. A doc jumping dog might take
off and enthusiastically hit the drink at full speed to
get to a bumper. Is it possible that a young
dog that watches this a few times might be more
inclined to leap off the old diving board as well?
Maybe it seems likely, But the old dog isn't some
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retired olympian teaching the next generation how to flip and
twist in the air from a height to ten meters.
The old dog is just doing what the old dog does,
and a young dog is round it. Does it hurt?
Probably not at all, and it might be some benefit.
While having two dogs, in my humble opinion, is twice
as good as having one dog, It's not without its downsides,
(09:11):
of which there are many. In this way, even if
it were true that old dogs are like the mentors
who set out specifically to mold their proteges into something
they could only dream of becoming, it's also true that
one extra dog in many training situations is one dog too.
Many puppies have notoriously short attention spans. Now, I'm going
(09:33):
to get into this in future episodes about puppies and
distraction training, but for now, understand this. If you have
a dog under about two years of age, other dogs
will pull that dog's attention so hard you will likely
lose out on anything you try to do with the dog. Now,
you might think, well, sure, other dogs, new dogs, strange
dogs still distract my pupster, but not the old dog
(09:56):
that I own and that lives with my young dog.
While this does tend to mitigate some level of distraction,
it's also not quite so simple. The easiest way to
test this is to try to train two dogs at
one time. If you've never done this, boy, are you
in for a good time. I have extra special insights
into this because I'm the father of twins, so I
(10:17):
had to train two babies at one time, which is
a job I was woefully underqualified for. I've also trained
both of my current dogs at the same time, including
when one was a true pupster. Even more than that,
I had the misfortune of having nextdoor neighbors for a
few years who did the big brain move of getting
two terriers at the same time, and then I watched
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them try to train both of those litter mates to
astoundingly terrible results. And it wasn't the dog's faults either,
it was the situation in which they lived and thus
were trained. Are there benefits to having two dogs? Absolutely,
in the right situation, I'd risk a divorce to have
more than two, because I think dogs make life a
(10:58):
hell of a lot better, and as I get older,
my tolerance for them doesn't change, but it does for
being around people. I prefer the company of four legged
buddies who can smell pheasants much better than I and
have no aversion to swimming through cold, cold, cold water
to find dead ducks and return them to me while
I sit in relative warmth sipping coffee. Multiple dogs are great,
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and for many of us, a necessity if you want
to always have one prime ish age dog with which
to hunt the deal though, is to recognize when the
two or more dogs are lowering the effectiveness of training
sessions or just degrading the learning experiences during actual hunts,
versus the times when having a season pro out there
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with a newbie is actually beneficial. This isn't as cut
and dry as you might think. I'll give you an
example here that smacked me upside the head last December
while standing in the middle of head high cattails trying
to get Sadie to find a rooster that had tumbled
to terra firma after soaking up a load of fives.
I thought, since it was Sadie's third season and she
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has been on a lot of birds already, that she
had the hunt dead command down just fine, thank you
very much. I can tell you about some badass rooster
retrie if she's come up with that would have put
any dog to the test. The thing, though, which occurred
to me while standing in that freezing slew, was that
she wasn't as good as I thought, because she always
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had the older dog to pick up the slack. And
if there is one thing an old seasoned dog really
excels at, it's finding those dead and wounded birds. Those
dogs have seen every trick, the runners, the hiders, the
birds that really really don't want to end up in
the game bag. A three year old dog doesn't have
that same resume. And it gets worse when you realize
(12:47):
how often the old dog has found a bird while
the young one didn't. That was a big blind spot
on my part and didn't become evident until I only
had the young dog to rely on for fine, wounded
and dead birds. Maybe the key is to look at
both dogs and yourself as a team, but to also
(13:07):
really develop each dog as an individual. In fact, that
probably is the only good way to go about this stuff.
It probably would pay to think about it like this.
All dogs need a lot of training. They just do
well at least working dogs anyway. The level that you'd
put into a solo dog, that's the level you should
put into every dog, regardless of how many you own.
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Instead of looking at it like the older dog will
somehow put on its teaching hat and relieve you of
some of your training duties, look at it like the
old dog can be an additive feature to your training.
There are benefits to an older dog being around a
younger one in a social setting and hell, even when
the older dog corrects your pop after it jumps on
the old timer's head and bites its ears with little
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needle teeth for the thousandth time, that's generally a better
scenario than a puppy jumping on a strange dog's head,
because that correction might not come softly. If you get
my drift, There are benefits in hunting settings, as I've
already outlined. An old dog that puts more grouse into
the air for you will allow the younger dog to
experience more of all parts of the hunt, including retrieves.
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You just have to be careful about looking past the
development of your fresh recruit in order to have the
best hunt you can because while those two goals aren't
mutually exclusive, they often just don't play very well together.
And you also have the reality that dogs are pack animals.
And while this can make training pups around other dogs
are real biz natcho, it's also one hell of a
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benefit for them in your home life. You might not
always want to engage your dog in play or give
it some pets or whatever, but two dogs together often
seem to figure out how to keep each other entertained.
All of this is to say, I fully encourage you
to get multiple dogs, although not multiple puppies at the
same time. Now, if you do pick up another one,
(14:56):
as you can see the painful reality that your original
dog may be aging pretty fast or a little closer
to the end than you maybe really want to admit,
just remember the level of inputs you need to develop
that dog not only into a great working dog, but
a well behaved companion. That's a heavy lift, and it
can be made much heavier by thinking that an old
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dog is going to grab a corner and help you
hold the whole thing up. They won't, but they can
help in many ways, and they don't have to be
a negative to the whole equation. You just have to
understand how to manage both and pay attention to the
subtle ways in which having multiple dogs might turn into
a problem down the road. It's a new set of challenges,
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but it's a great problem to have. That's it for
this episode. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. This has been
The Houndation's podcast. As always, I want to thank you
so much for tuning in and for all of your support.
You know, all of us here at meet Either truly
appreciate it. If you're just getting keyed up for the
season and you want to keep training your dogs, or
(16:02):
maybe you're going on that first Western haunt, or maybe
it's a most white tail season for you. The meadeater
dot com has so much hunting content. You can go
and read articles, you can find recipes for those doves
or tea or whatever early season birds you're gonna chase,
or you can just fill some time on maybe a
long road trip listening to Clay's Bear Grease podcasts, Wired
(16:24):
to Haunt or whatever. So much content there to keep
you entertained and educated. Go check it out at the
medeater dot com and as always, thank you so much
for listening.