Cove Mountain Kennels

Title: The Ultimate Guide to Bird Dog Training: A Realistic Approach to Training Close-Working Gun Dogs for Tight Cover Conditions

Author: Jerome B. Robinson
The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut
ISBN: 1-59228-161-3
Copyright 2000

What kind of dog training book do you get from a 30 year veteran gun dog editor of both Sports Afield and Field & Stream? What you get is a whole collection of good magazine articles on dog training. You get this idea right away reading the titles of the different chapters, such as: Your Kid Can Be Your Best Assistant, Don’t Let Your Hunting Companion Ruin Your Dog, and A Trick That Makes Him Whoa with a High Tail.

The book is a series of forty-three 1500 word articles (chapters) that are ready for publication in a general sportsman’s magazine. Robinson covers a broad variety of topics in the book, from picking your puppy to getting the dog steady to shot, however, most of the chapters are somewhat superficial. They cover the ideal, but don’t get into the realities of training situations. This was especially true in the chapter on force fetching a dog.

The book was published in 2000, but many of the photos look like they were taken in the 1970’s. Some of the methods and training tools discussed are similarly not current. The e-collar chapter was inserted in the front of the book as an afterthought, and is seldom mentioned in the rest of the text.

That said, I did buy myself a copy of the book, because of the breadth of issues covered. There are lots of good training tidbits and things to consider in the book. And it is apparent that he has spoken to a lot of dog trainers over the years about different aspects of training a bird dog. It may be important to note that this book is primarily written for pointers, not flushers or retrievers.