00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. Today's episode is all about the very earliest stages of planning on getting a new little pupster. A lot of folks decide they're going to get a spring puppy and then they start looking for one about six seconds before they actually want to pick one up. Look, that's one way to do it, but a better way is to start months ahead of time, or hell years ahead of time if you need to, in order to not only decide on what you're going to get, but when and why. We often don't give this stage of the process a whole lot of love, but it's important and it gives us a chance, at least academically, to flesh out what the best choice in dog breed really is for us. And that's what I'm going to talk about right freaking now. Back when my little girls were five, my wife said we should take them to Disney World. I was about as excited to do that as I would be if she said she wanted to hook a car battery up to my delegates just to see how much electricity I could handle. Somehow, and I don't really know how we ended up going to Disney World anyway, just like she wanted to, and you know what, it was awesome. I expected to trudge along and pay for seventy five dollars chicken strip baskets every day, but it was honestly so much fun. My daughters were at an age where the Disney World thing was truly magical to them. The princesses were real instead of just dressed up college girls trying to avoid creepy middle aged dudes, which is a wild rabbit hole to go down if you ever read about it. The rides and the shows were all amazing to my daughters, and that made it so much fun. Despite the fact that not only is Disney the most magical place on Earth but also the most expensive, it was really enjoyable, largely due to the fact that we just threaded the needle with my daughters and their age and their willingness to engage in that kind of thing. They even did Tower of Terror, which in hindsight I wouldn't recommend for five year olds. The folks down there in Orlando they do a good job and the parks clean so well run. So four years later, after we had crawled out of the financial hold that the first trip left us in. My wife said we should go back. I agreed, but only on a smaller scale, and with a guarantee that we'd go somewhere else for half of our trip where we could catch some fish in the salt. COVID had other plans, though, and they shut the whole place down while we were on the plane headed south to Disney World. It wasn't ideal, but we had a credit, and we went back the following year to a place that was a lot less magical. Now the girls were way older. The princesses, you know, definitely were no longer real to them, and honestly, the moment had just passed. It was a good life lesson, honestly. And it applies to dogs if you can believe that. Let me give you an example of how. I have a really good buddy who grew up pheasant hunting like crazy in southeastern Minnesota. His parents' house used to be surrounded by CRP and he had permission to roam hundreds of acres of it. His first dog was a male Golden Retriever named Buster, and that dog was a pheasant hunting fool. There's no substitute for bird contact and experience when it comes to developing a really good bird dog, and Buster got a lot of both. He was a great dog. But those CRP contracts went away, and for a long time it was more profitable to plant corn and soybeans than leave fields and grass for a decade at a time. With that change went most to the pheasants, not all of them. There are still pockets of them down there, but you're not going to have too many days when you're just flushing birds all day long and you get your limit by noon or whatever. My buddy's hunting habits have changed because of that reality. He still hunts pheasants down there, but he might kill three or four birds in an entire season. He hunts ducks more now than anything, because every pond and every stream and every river and every lake is a potential hunting spot for migrating waterfowl, which means that there's always some marginal duck habitat not too far away. If you have low standards, that's a pretty good match. But he's on his fourth golden retriever now, and if you want a good duck dog, because that's primarily what you hunt, the moment has kind of passed for that breed. Now, before you fire up your torches and grab your pitchforks, let me say this, and I have to say this a lot. I love Goldens, I really do. I love their personalities and their quirks. I love their general nature, and I love it when they're really good and they hunt really hard. They can be great hunters. But if you primarily hunt ducks and you want a dog that acts like a Golden but doesn't come with as much baggage, a lab is just kind of a better choice. It just is, at least for most people, and definitely for the people who don't want pay up for a field bred Golden that will have better blood than a show golden. But my buddy is a Golden retriever guy because that's his breed, even though it doesn't make nearly as much sense now as it used to. And we almost all do this, and I realize I'm swimming in dangerous waters here, but it's important to talk about, especially if you're interested in getting a new puppy at this stage where you're thinking I might want one in you know, maybe three or four months, or maybe in another year. You want to think about these things. We get married to a certain breed for a lot of reasons, but one thing that creates a poignant lesson is moving from one breed to another. Hell, I'll make it even easier than that, moving from one dog to another regardless of breed, because we all think we have the best dogs ever, and in a way, we are all right. But something magical happens. When you get a new puppy, they somehow always grow into being a bet better dog than your last one, And then when you get another one after that, the same thing tends to happen. Now, you can get some clunker dogs or dogs that just don't have what you want, but that's almost always due to not paying attention to the process I'm talking about right now, and we'll definitely talk about in some other episodes when I go way deeper into bloodlines and pedigrees and really finding the right litter for you. But for now, just know that you have the best dog ever, but you will also have an even better dog in the future. That's just how it works with dogs, and it isn't breed specific. You might love labs or German short hairs or whatever, and they might be the perfect choice for your life and your hunting style, or maybe your life or your hunting situation has changed and that dog that was perfect is now sort of forced into a role it's not really meant for. No one wants to acknowledge this, but it happens all the time. The first part of this process involves a hell of a lot of self reflection. What do you want the dog for now? Do you still quail hunt like a fiend in huge tracks of ground in the southeast, Then there might not be any reason for you to move on from your beloved pointers. But what if you used to hunt bob waits like crazy and I don't know Kansas or Nebraska, but you can't find a covey these days, and you're all about that rooster duck life. Maybe that pointer isn't the best choice anymore for you. Or maybe you used to be like me and you had tons and tons of free time as a young man, so you could train any dog for just about any hunting situation, just by sheer will, and so it didn't matter as much what kind of a dog you had, as long as you had one that was somewhat trainable. In that stage of life, you have the opportunity to get them bird contacts and run through a million drills and really round them out, so no matter what, the finished product was going to be good in that. But now you're like me, and suddenly, out of nowhere, you have two thirteen year old girls who are in not one, but two basketball leagues, so that when they get done with school, they have basketball practice and then all of a sudden another basketball practice, and all of that practicing doesn't do them any good unless they also play in games, which these days, because of all of us stupid ass parents, or at least half of the parents who are absolutely batshit crazy, there are tournaments every weekend in some town you've vaguely heard of, where we just uber our kids to these places and buy them lunch at whatever restaurant is close by, and our whole lives have been consumed by this activity monster in a way that cannot be good. Would it make sense in that situation to get a dog that is a high drive dog and needs tons of stimulation and really can't develop well without a shitload of exercise in bird contacts? Maybe not. Where are you at in life right now, and where can you make an educated guess you'll be throughout the next twelve years or so. If you're going to stay in your apartment in Chicago, does it really make sense to go out and get a German short hair that has been bred to cover huge swaths of cover and hunt like it's the only thing in the world that matters? Maybe not. Where are you now and where are you likely to be? What are you likely to hunt with your dogs? What does your free time situation look like as far as training. Do you have as much time as you used to? I bet not, at least for most of us who aren't about to retire anyway. Do you have access to the same ground, with the same cover, the same birds that you had when you got your first wire hair three dogs ago? If not, does it still make sense to go with that breed just because you like them? Maybe? But maybe not. This is something that none of us want to do, but it's important. It's also really important to acknowledge what we can give a dog, because it's not just about what they can do for us, even though they don't have a choice in the matter. If that's the way we go about it, I'll give you a couple examples here. A few years ago, I took my daughter's sledding at this park by our house that has a popular hill, which tells you how flat this area is and is not coincidentally one of the many reasons I don't like living here a whole lot. Anyway, we had a woman walk up to us with a pup that she was socializing. She had a beautiful little five month old German short hair female that was wearing a sweater, and this lady volunteered up a lot of information about her life. When I asked her if she hunted, she said, nope, neither does her husband. But the dog comes from top end hunting lines, whatever that means to her. She said, she walks that little GSP lot to get an exercise. And I thought, imagine if you were born to do something and you ended up with someone who had total control over your life, who kept you from ever ever doing that very thing. Look, I love freedom a lot, so I don't think she should be kept from getting a dog like that. But I think it's on us as owners to recognize that it's an unfair situation to put a dog in that little female GSP needs to hunt and should have gone to a hunter, not someone who loves the idea of owning a high drive GSP because that's what they had growing up. Now I realized that might make me sound like a prick, but I'm okay with that. I think in her case, she should put herself in the position of that specific dog and try to be self aware enough to acknowledge she will never give it the thing it needs more than anything in the world. This is a hard thing for most folks to do, and I'm not done yet. I typically see this far more with guys, but being honest about your training ability is a huge part of the puppy buying process. I don't know how many people have told me they love Labrador Retrievers but they don't want to get one because they are too popular. Look, be a contrarian all you want, but maybe ask yourself why that is. Why do you want to be that way? We all know the reasons, but one we don't talk about a whole lot that is MOOI importante is that labs are generally pretty easy to train. Some dog breeds just are, so when you're being a contrarian and going away from them, you're also going away from a dog that can make up for some of your shortfalls. Why go out and get a dog that is more difficult to train so that you have to go right into using an e caller to make up for your own shortcomings when you could get a dog that would be just so much easier to convince to give you desired behaviors. This is one of the reasons I love female labs. I'm not an expert trainer. I haven't gotten my hands on hundreds of with various backgrounds and bad habits and had to tease out the best of them in a limited amount of time like professional trainers do. I want a dog that is easy to train, because then it's well easier for me as a trainer. It's also a good scenario for the dogs I get, because then I'm not fighting their stubbornness or some innate trait they have that puts them beyond my skill level as a trainer. We talk about dogs like we are buying a car. We say I like forwards, and I like them black or gray, so I'm going to the dealership to get an F one fifty in the right shade. And then we say I like dogs with beards, so I'm going to get a drawa or I like the idea of a tripod point on a rough grouse in the big woods. So I'm going to get a breed for that. But what are you able to put into the dog and coax out of that dog? Maybe you recognize that you don't want a high drive dog at home, although you want one in the field like everyone does. Well, that dog doesn't really exist right out of the gate. Those dogs are made by training and proper care, and while some breeds are easier to get there than others, the idea that you're going to get one right out of the litter that has an amazing off switch at home and drive for days in the field is mostly just marketing speak around certain breeds without your intervention and guidance. It's mostly a pipe tream. I'm going to go into a lot more stuff about finding the right puppy in future episodes, but for this one, I just hope to get everyone to think about why they want what they want, and if that is really the best choice for their lives at the moment, and if that is the best choice for the dog they want, because that's almost a bigger factor, although we don't want to think about it, so I guess I'll wrap this one up this way with my closing argument on the topic. Give yourself time in this process. Later you'll whittle down the options to the right litter and all that jazz. But if you're just thinking about getting a new puppy, or hell, if you have your heart set on a new one by a specific point of the year, give yourself as much time as possible to think through some of this stuff. Try to be honest about what you want out of this commitment, and then let that honesty guide you through your choices. Maybe it's very simple. Maybe you live along the Mississippi River and have a whole outbuilding dedicated to duck boats and duck decoys, and sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night reaching for a duck collar around your neck that isn't there. Well, your breed choice is probably pretty simple. You probably have a pretty good idea what you need to do training wise for that dog. But a lot of us don't have quite as obvious guardrails on the whole thing. Our lives change, and we have kids and they move out, and we spend time in the suburbs and then move to rural areas and all kinds of things happen with jobs and everything else we have going on throughout that are our dogs, and while they are a constant in our lives in one form or another, the process of getting another one is not to be taken lightly or simply a decision, and we should base on the history of one breed or another with us. We owe it to ourselves in any little pupster we might end up taking home, to spend some time trying to be self aware and to really dive into what our lives are all about, what we want a dog for in regard to hunting and non hunting life, and what kind of dog would be a great fit. Once we parse all of that out, we want it to be a simple thing like buying a certain truck and a certain color. But your vehicle isn't a living, breathing creature that was bred to do certain tasks, learn in a specific way, and exhibit behaviors that may or not be conducive to all aspects of your life. At least kick this around, think about it, and then come back next week, because I'm going to talk about positivity and dog training and why it's just so important. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast. As always, thank you so much for your support. Iruly appreciate it. Here at meat Eater we're getting up here close to Christmas. If you need a gift for somebody, you can go to the medeater dot com and check out our store. Tons of stuff there, lots of sales at different times. Or if you just need some more content, some articles, some recipes, maybe you need to listen to a few more podcasts to kill the time at work or your drive. The meeteater dot com so much stuff there, go check it out, and again, thank you for everything.