00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today is all about when reality crashes into our dreams of perfect dogs and perfect hunts and what that means for our off season. You know how everyone is just super pissed off lately and we all want to kill each other and everything sucks. Well, part of that, at least in my extremely unprofessional opinion, stems from us just being exposed to so much BS in our lives. We go online and everywhere return. It's propaganda mostly meant to either divide us or sell us something, and often those two are way closer linked than they might seem. We just know what reality is for all of us, and it's not as much fun as it was before everyone had access to us all the time and the algorithms got so good that they could just ruin our days. Reality can suck, but not all reality checks have to. Sometimes they point us in a better direction. And when that happens in the world of you know, being a bird dog owner, it's actually a pretty good thing as long as we don't fight it, which is what I'm going to talk about right now. Right before January ended, I loaded up the dark Barker and pointed my truck down into the left to go to Nebraska. On the way, I was supposed to pick up my cameraman and Sue fall south Dakota. Now I wasn't fifteen minutes down the road when he called me to say that it seemed pretty unlikely he'd make his connecting flight, which is one of those things that just happens a lot in my world. With nothing to do but keep driving, I figured I'd be fast asleep at the hotel by the time he landed, but it would eventually work out. I also didn't realize that the weather that had his flight plans all messed up was also waiting for me. I wasn't through the cities before I saw a semi jackknife across the northbound lanes of Highway one sixty nine, and that told me a lot. And then my truck decided to do a little freestyle driving on the ice, which told me a lot more. It became clear that the easy four hour drive I was expecting just wasn't going to happen. And by the time it got dark, the snow was blowing sideways in the worst white out I've ever driven in, which is saying something. As a native Minnesotan, it was brutal, and there were several times where I just had to keep my tires on the rumble strip and keep going because that was the only way I knew I was on the road. I wasn't even halfway to my destination when I pulled into a hotel parking lot and accepted my defeat. The next morning, it dawned crazy cold and clear, and I made the last half of the drive to pick up my cameraman. We eventually pulled into a chunk of public land in northern Nebraska to start filming some pheasants flushing and hopefully also falling to the ground. It took all of about two minutes before we actually put up a rooster in range, and when Sadie brought him back to me, I figured we were really onto something. But that was the only rooster of the day. Despite flushing a lot of birds, almost all of which knew that magic distance where they were almost close enough to cause me to light up both barrels but just not quite there. I didn't care too much because we were headed to hunt private land quail the next morning, and then off to find some prairie chickens and sharp tails in the sand hills. Now, when we showed up to a friend of a friend's ranch to hunt some quail, his dad decided to help us out and show us where they'd been seeing some covees. We tried a few spots, came up blank, and he told us to hop in with him and he'd drive to a few pivot corners that might hold some bob whites. Now, we hunted the first spot, and it seemed pretty clear that we were fighting a losing battle. The cover just wasn't right and it just didn't have the right feel, But we kept going until one point he drove his truck across a chopped cornfield, and those popping stocks in the general noise of it freaked Sadie out. I didn't see it coming, because how do you see something like that coming with your dogs? And she took off as fast as a prime age four year old lab and good hunting condition can run, with about thirty yards in her rear view mirror, she hid an old barbed wire fence, which was one of the more violent things I've witnessed with bird dogs. I knew our hunt was over as soon as it happened, and was genuinely surprised that she wasn't in worse shape when I called her back to me. She had a pretty good cut in her ear, but nothing that wouldn't heal on its own, and some superficial cuts on her belly. But then I noticed ay not so superficial cut in the loose skin between her belly and the inside of her thigh. While it looked like it was just the skin and not really any muscle or anything worse underneath which I could see, it was the kind of hole in your dog that you'd rather not leave to chance. What had been a carefully planned out hunt to build a film around became an exercise in finding an emergency vet in the middle of very rural part of Nebraska. Now we got lucky on that front, finally finding a vet clinic in Atkinson, Nebraska that not only does amazing work, but is full of the nicest people in an area chock full of really nice people. That was the plus side, but the downsides were many. Thought them a lot as I drove through another ice storm home and realized how lucky I've been with my dogs on trips over the years. We've never had a serious injury, and the two times my dogs have spent the night at emergency vet clinics, we're both for eating something bad, and both with my dog Luna. Not that that really matters, but the porcupines and the random country traffic and fences and sketchy ice and all of the things that can turn a good day into a bad one in an instant had mostly left us alone. It actually made me feel lucky and also reminded me that it's not a matter of if something goes wrong if you do this enough, but when and how bad. Reality often comes screeching into our lives, and it's usually not very much fun. But there's a different way we can mess up with our dogs, and it's not quite the same thing as watching them slam headfirst into an old barber ware fence, but the damage happens anyway, and it sucks. This comes in the form of unrealistic expectations on our end about our dogs. Couple this with a false reed on ourselves as dog owners, and we can do our four legged hunting buddies dirty real fast. Now, with the first point, consider how often someone you know has said, or maybe you've said, something like this that goes. I want a dog that will hunt pheasants and waterfall all day long, but does embark our wine and also has an amazing off switch at home. The dog should also be highly trainable, good with kids, able to handle twelve hours a day in a crate, and can only be some obscure breed. I'm being a little facetious here, a little, but the truth is that a lot of people approach getting a new dog like they would if they were ordering a cheeseburger in a restaurant. You know, I want it medium well with pepper jack, cheese, no tomatoes, extra lettuce, no pickles, onions, blah blah blah. That's great, but doesn't work with dogs because while you can order up the raw ingredients kind of, you still have to be the cook. Now, if you're realistic, you'll understand that a dog is a living creature that is going to have a personality and certain tendencies, and is largely going to be shaped by you, whether you do anything positive to shape it or not. The job only gets less likely to work out if you start to narrow down that dog to a specific breed or color of breed that might not be conducive to the kind of genetics you need and the kind of temperament you want. This isn't like buying a new truck. You're hedging your bets on a living creature and a long relationship with them. I'm not saying it's not a good idea to be selective or have discriminating taste when it comes to dogs, because that's actually a really good thing if you're realistic about it. If you decide you want some rare breed for whatever reason, but your list of wants with that breed is long, you're saying you don't really understand what limiting your choice of bloodlines does. You can wish all you want, but that doesn't change anything. I'm sure a lot of dog owners might take offense to what I'm saying or disagree with me because they're dogs are the best ever. But I bet a lot of trainers are nodding their heads in agreement, and they'll keep nodding as I get into the next point, which is that we are very realistic about ourselves when it comes to how we choose our dogs and what we choose to do with them when we finally have them. Let's take one of my favorite breeds here as a good example, the Labrador retriever. I know a lot of people look down on labs, but one of the reasons I love them is because if I get a good one with the right blood, it'll turn out pretty well in spite of the training mistakes I'm bound to make, and I will make mistakes. But a breed like that has been bred to work with idiots like me, and despite the ways in which I might misread a situation with them, they'll generally figure out how to make everyone involved happy, and they'll forgive me my mistakes. There are other breeds that won't, or at least won't forgive them as readily. There are other breeds, quite a few of them that don't really have a strong general desire to work for anyone either. Look, they can be rained in and turn into something to love at home and in the field, but the process will look a lot different and could be a major contributor to you going gray long before you need to now. The right person match with the right dog is a thing of beauty, regardless of the person or the breed, But the baseline we should all consider is something I harp on a lot in this podcast, which is what breed what specific bloodline, and then what am I going to do to be the best I can with what I'm getting. There is also another reality check that no one likes to think about, and that's when what we think about our dog runs headlong into what our dog actually is. Over on the bow hunting side of my life, I have faced this a couple of times, and it always really sucked. For a long time. When I started bowhunting deer, I missed them a lot, like a lot. My buck fever was rough shit and it almost caused me to quit forever and take up golf. Now, I finally had a disastrous, absolutely no oh good season when I was old enough to know better, and I finally sat down and I deconstructed my problem. To rebuild myself from scratch. It took new archery tackle, a new mindset to practice, a willingness to really try to learn how to set up for chip shots, and a couple of years of bowhunting in several states, and you know what, I kind of beat it and it felt great. But then I started having to film hunts and it came roaring back. But that's another story. The reality of what I thought of myself as a bow hunter and what I was as a bowhunter were different things. And it wasn't that rare case where I was way more awesome than I actually thought I was. It was the opposite. With dogs. Most of us are in the same boat, but we are also very willing to accept our dogs as they are because we love them so much. So when something happens like your dog loses four easy birds in a row or runs off for half an hour while you're screaming in the field, you're facing reality with a perfect dog, which is what we think we have, but a dog that needs some more training and guidance and structure is what we actually all really have. So think about last season, think about the times your hunting buddies made a not so funny to you joke about your dog behavior. Think about what you avoid doing with your dog because you know that it'll be a thing that last one might be the most important, and it can be anything from not wanting your dog to be out of his crate when someone shows up at your house because you'll go nuts and won't leave them alone, to not wanting to go sit in the dock or goose blind with your buddies because your dog is going to bark NonStop and flare the birds. Maybe your pointer works like a dream when you're out solo, but the minute you invite a buddy and his dog along, the wheels fall right off. So you just decide it's best that you always hunt alone. And that's one solution. But you can also train your dog to behave the way you want him to in pretty much any situation if you're willing to work on the problem and start addressing the parts of that problem through training. This is a lot of work, but it's the foundational element of changing the reality of your situation. It's kind of like how every middle aged dude out there still thinks he can bench two twenty five, you know, run a seven minute mile and would probably fare pretty well in the middleweight UFC fight. Sure, sure, on that front, it's pretty easy to figure out what reality really is by throwing a couple of plates on the bench and seeing if your shoulders don't pop out of their sockets when you try to do a rep, or you know, lacing up your new pair of running shoes and seeing how fast you can go and for how long, or in the case of the cage fights. Just trust me on that one. With our dogs, we believe a lot of things that aren't really true because it protects our egos, but also probably because we just don't really know how to fix certain issues. The first step here is to understand that the issues exist, and then not only to start to figure them out, but start to work with your dog on how to play the long game to steer them in a better direction. In a way, you can look at this stuff not like, well, that's what he always does, and instead say that's what I let him do. Just reframing it changes the whole thing. A real simple one here, real simple example would be a dog that spits out a bumper or a ball or a bird before it gets to you. That's a common issue with a lot of bird dogs, and some folks just accept it and they're okay with it. But that's not an unfixable issue. It's a huge pain in the ass if you have a dog that has grown very comfortable spitting out a bumper six feet in front of you. But it's not like figuring out how the hell they built the pyramids four thousand years ago. This one's doable. Take another one, someone said to me very recently that was driving them nuts. Their dog doesn't handle a crate well, it throws a doggy fit every time they create it, and so they let it out. Now, any of you find folks who have ever slipped one past the goalie or just pulled the goalie entirely specific to score a goal. Know that babies would rather sleep in your bed, snuggled up next to you than swaddled all alone in a crib. So they let you know in the most annoying crying style they can summon, and if you give in enough, you'll have issues putting that child to bed for a long, long, long time. It'll only get worse as that child grows and becomes I don't know, you know, the kind of human that needs to play and learn and wear themselves out. But you don't foster that opportunity and then decide you want to put them to bed at six every night so you can have your evenings free. It's not going to work out very well. With dogs. Pretty much the same rules apply, and just like with dogs, the earlier you start to get them to understand that the structure of their lives is pretty dang rigid, the easier they'll take to it, and then less they'll fight you on it. Although they're going to fight you on it some the reality is that the solution is there, and even though it'll be hard to get to, it'll be better for you and your dog. That's maybe the last point I want to make with this one, which is that every reality check we face as dog owners might not make us feel super awesome, but if we take it seriously, it'll make our lives and the lives of our dogs better. Now, before I sign off on this one, I'll just say this, I look at this kind of like look at I don't know anything that's worthwhile in our lives. It might feel like a big task, too big to be appealing in fact, like getting in shape or maybe trying to drop some weight, But if you look at it big picture wise, that stuff seems kind of impossible. But walking ten thousand steps a day instead of five it's a huge start. Just like ditching soda for something a little healthier is with dogs. You won't change your whole dog in a couple of weeks, and you wouldn't want to if you could. It's the small, consistent stuff that shapes them into better versions of themselves. And they won't do that without our help, and we won't do that without accepting reality and what that entails. This is the perfect time of year to not only consider this, but to go out and get after it. That's it for this episode of Houndations. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. Thank you so much for listening, for all your support. I know you're bored out of your mind right now, or at least a lot of you probably are. Head on over to the medeater dot com. Check out all the great stuff that's going on there. We drop new hunting films, we drop new podcasts, new articles, new recipes. All the time. There's new content going up literally almost every day if you want to keep you up to date on you know, conservation issues that are going on and public land issues and a lot of these things that really affect us, you know, in the outdoors. They're doing a great job there at the mediator dot com of dropping like up to the minute stories on all of these issues that affect us. Or if you want something a little lighter, not so heavy, crazy amount of good podcast to listen to there. One of them is Jordan Siller's Blood Trails which is a new show that we started dropping pretty recently and he is doing an incredible job on that. You will love it if you go check it out, especially if you're into murder mysteries and that kind of stuff. Go check out Blood Trails, but check out the mediator dot com and thank you once again for all your support.