Damn, I like my rescue mutt.

Training a Rescue Dog

I adopted a rescue dog from the human society. Previously, I had pure breed hunting dogs. This time around, I just wanted a good companion/house dog. My bird hunting days are fading, but a dog to walk every day is good thing. And for that a rescue dog would do and it wouldn’t cost $1000 or more.

I’ve trained two good bird dogs, mostly following Richard Wolters’ classic Gun Dog. Call it Dog Training 1.0. Wolters wrote it in 1961. For years it was the bible for training hunting dogs. More recently it has fallen somewhat out of favor. But here’s the deal, it’s premised on training that starts with a seven or eight week-old, pure bred puppy.

Pure bred puppy is operative. Breeding was crucial Wolters claimed, and training any dog older the six months was iffy at best.

Needless to say, a year old rescue cur doesn’t fit that mold.

Nature of a Cur

Cur is a fancy name for a mutt. Originally it meant mixed breed of unknown origins. In the southern states, through Appalachia and into Ohio, curs were purposely bred. For the most part they are a mix of terrier and hound. This mixed breeding dates to colonial times. The terrier/hound mix resulted in a dog that would both keep rodents under control and would be good hunting dogs, particularly for raccoons and squirrels. Now, there are maybe a dozen officially recognized cur breeds. In physical characteristics, temperament and behavior, my new dog closely resembles a Mountain View Cur. [text]

Training the Cur

In terms of training this dog I’m walking on unknown ground. Call it Dog Training 2.0. I don’t know if a book has been written on that yet. My first goal is a good house dog; the second is a good off leash outdoor dog; and goal three is a good hunting dog if she has the instinct for it. Goal one is the most important.

Wolters’ training builds off the insecurity and instincts of a puppy. All of the basic training for a gun dog happens in the first four weeks, in the context of play, bonding and exercise. During this time the dog learns to quarter, follow hand signals, hold point, retrieve and follow the commands for come, sit and stay, and whoa. From three to six months this basic training is enforced with, what I consider, mild discipline – consisting of grabbing the dog by the nape of its neck and yelling at it. Wolters contended this is as close as we can get to the sort of discipline a juvenile dog would experience in a dog pack.

His methods worked well for my first two dogs. They were decent hunting dogs at six months and improved as they matured. But, his methods have to be significantly modified to train a year old rescue cur.

That aside, in training a year old rescue dog and a pure breed puppy, things are similar, but not the same. Instead of a puppy, I’m dealing with the different insecurities and instincts of juvenile shelter dog. All I know about my new cur is that she has spent between six weeks to maybe six months, before we adopted her, getting shuttled from one shelter to the next – first a dog pound in Georgia, then a kill shelter in Tennessee and finally a rescue shelter in Brookfield.

So for example, a guy can bond with a puppy in three or four days. A year-old rescue dog is more leery and skittish. Bonding is a two or three week process. As for discipline, grabbing the dog by the neck and yelling at it won’t do. Instead, it’s an authoritative command only made when the dog has an inclination to obey. Obedience is greeted with heaps of enthusiastic praise and any physical correction is very gently done.

Observation is Key

The difference in training a pure breed dog and a mutt is that with a pure breed dog the desired behavior of a particular breed is known. With a Humane Society adoption the predominant traits of the dog are unknown. Observation is the larger point of dog training.

At the shelter I observed a dog that was friendly to strangers, children, other dogs and cats.  I observed a curious, active and at the same time reticent dog. Upon adopting her, she was a frightened dog who kept her tail between her legs mostly for two weeks. On walks she was startled by passing pedestrians, cars and other dogs. She would freeze up. From the get-go obedience wasn’t number one priority. It wasn’t ignored but getting a year old dog right with being a dog was much more important.

One Thing at a Time

Obedience training periods were short, not more than three or four minutes. In bonding with the dog, periods of affection and play were much longer. After a month here’s I was at:

I had a good house dog. In the house she now started to consistently respond to the following commands: down; sit/stay; come; kennel; cut-that-out; and don’t think about that.

More importantly she was proudly holding her tail so that it points to the sky and wags a lot. She opened up into a cheerful little dog that likes to play with us, other dogs and otherwise keeps entertained with her toys and chews. I think have a dog that for the first time is experiencing life outside of the environment of a shelter.

So as for Wolters’ recommendation that dog training starts at seven or eight weeks, with a rescue dog, it might be a year old physically, but in every other way might be still and eight week old puppy. So, instead, that’s a starting point.

Chasing a Dog while Screaming – Probably Poor Technique

As for a good backyard dog, she’s about half way there. She’s easily distracted and does like to run. The running is a burst of energy that goes on for about three or four minutes and during these episodes the “come” command is kind of a waste of time. As Rita says, from time to time “she goes crazy.” But when she takes off, she stays within about fifty yards from our back yard. She scampers around visiting our neighbors and their dogs. I’ll need to rein her in some and it will take a while. For now I don’t think chasing her about in a screaming rage would be all that effective toward training.

More importantly, as I recall training a dog to be solid on command off lead takes about a year. It takes about three years to cement in the partnership between the dog and its handler.

A gun dog?  Well maybe. She has a good nose and seems inclined to point. She has webbed feet. And most importantly, she has a ton of energy. But she covers ground more like a treeing dog rather than a bird dog. And she tends to be gun shy. It could be a manifestation of a rescue dog’s skittishness. I’ll go slow with that, and we’ll see. I am anxiously waiting for a booming thunderstorm to see how she reacts.

The Dog, a Deer and a Missed Training Opportunity

Since adopting her six weeks ago, I finally heard her bark. A deer wandered into my back yard and was casually grazing in Rita’s flowers. I pointed this intruder out to the dog and she locked up on point and held point until the deer wandered from her view. When that happened, she raised voice into a chorus of every noise a dog can make: growling, barking, howling and wining all in succession and oddly all at the same time. This went on for four or five minutes.

The dog wanted to get on that deer in big way. I thought of letting her lose and then I thought better. My god I thought, should my little dog be spotted terrorizing a deer throughout my neighborhood, late on a Saturday afternoon, it would not have been viewed in the light of normal and regular dog training. But, should I’ve had my late afternoon martini and been thinking more rationally, I might have let her have a chase and she would have learned a small dog cannot run down a deer.

Damn, I like my rescue mutt.