Family Dog

It's been a while since I've written a book report. Bare with me.

I have nearly completed reading Family Dog, by Richard A. Wolters [Dutton Adult; Revised edition (February 1, 1999)]. Most people that have trained a gun dog are probably familiar with Wolters. His other books, Gun Dog, Water Dog, and Game Dog are well known and highly regarded.

Family Dog focuses on basic obedience training. Wolters also shares his philosophy of when to start training a dog, and he supports his philosophy by citing research done by the Seeing Eye. The Seeing Eye has discovered that you can greatly improve your chances of having a well-trained dog if you start training at 7 weeks. Contrary to many assumptions, a dog's brain is completely developed after only 6 months. Your pup only lacks experiences and repetition. It is really fascinating and helpful how Wolters breaks down training by the dog's cognitive development. It is basically broken down into four stages. I plan on using his method on my next pup, but it will require a commitment. One of the stages where Wolters recommends introducing a new experience to the pup, only lasts a couple of weeks. I agreed with the "meat" of the book, but as he got into later chapters on breaking negative behavior, he started to lose me a little. Some of his techniques seemed to require tricking the dog into doing a particular behavior so that you could associate this behavior with a negative consequence. I am unsure if I would choose to look for negative behaviors proactively. For example, he discusses the problem of "dog napping". He stages a scenario where you get an assistant to sit in a car and entice the dog to get in their car. After the dog gets in the car, you are to have the assistant be rough with the dog and give the dog a spanking outside of the car.

I highly recommend this book as a supplement to any other gun dog training books you may have. Wolters makes some salient points that any dog owner can use.